This is a fantastic article: informative, well-written, thoughtful, human, and funny. And it’s especially interesting to see it posted here at HN, because while reading it I kept thinking there are some solid lessons here about entrepreneurship, sales, and product pricing that could certainly be applied to your average start-up SaaS.
I mean, anchoring your price high, to better capture the businessman/enterprise market? And that this market also happens to be less likely to be time-suck jerks about little issues, or constantly asking for product changes/features? Literally better b̶a̶n̶g̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶buck for your bang.
And it’s right out of the classic @patio11 essays, too. Charge more, indeed.
"I’ve had many clients that I remember fondly and who mean a lot to me. One client I would regularly hold in close skin-to-skin contact as he cried, and I cried with him; another was young and vibrant and too big for the small world around him. Another was a quadriplegic, and yet another was a talented writer who valued rarely seen things in me and encouraged me to do great things without ever once implying escorting was beneath me. Another whose wife had recently died and found me as his first foray into being with another woman, because he couldn’t bear to fully date another person yet. I’ve had clients figure out who I am and show up asking me to tripsit them on psychedelics, wildly successful CEOs who treated me as an intellectual equal, or people who were dying of cancer and didn’t want to go out without another bang (I recently looked up one of my favorite clients and instead found his obituary)."
I actually read the entire thing. It was worth it imo. Some stand outs were her kind words about her clients (almost strange to see men as a class described with such positive words). She is clearly a very rational and intelligent person and this is a business to her like any other. Yeah I really don’t get why this stuff is illegal, even though I have no interest myself.
Her experience is not a good indicator or whether it should be legal or not . She is an exception even as an escort, and also high end escort work she describes here is very very different from the run on the mill prostitution.
Her strategy of avoiding trouble by keeping price higher even if lower frequency engagements may not be feasible for many, they may be unable to get clients at higher price points and like any biz pressure to generate revenue is immense.
The question of whether it's good and wholesome is orthogonal to the question of whether society should punish those who do it.
Scenario A: Resourceful, successful, happy. Should she be forced to accept dangerous working conditions and live under the constant threat of eviction, imprisonment, harassment and stigma? Why? What's the argument in favor of making her life difficult?
Scenario B: Physical or mental disability, unattractive, can't afford to refuse clients even though they make her unsafe, doesn't have any other way to pay for rent, food, meds and diapers. Should she be prevented from going to the police when someone beats, rapes or robs her? Should she be prevented from organizing with her friends for mutual protection? Should she be prevented from advertising online and instead forced onto the streets? Again, why? What's the argument in favor of making her life even more difficult?
The point is her experience is niche and unique, it is not indicative of how the industry at large actually operates so making any judgements would not be meaningful as OP was doing.
but the issue the article points out that she as an escort has no access to law, should something go wrong.
If an in-house hair dresser was assaulted/robbed/stolen from, they would be able to report it to the police. There would be a strong chance (well as high as any other crime) that it would be punished.
There would also be an opportunity to use/create a verification scheme for clients, but also ask for insurance/tax/qualifications for the hair dresser.
This is what operating in a "decriminalized" world looks like. You don't get harassed by the law, but they wont help you either.
Ideally we would have a world where sex work is legally allowed (so long as its not coerced) and allow those workers to form companies, hire security, use payment systems, have vetting functions. All of the services that would make life much less precarious.
I know that in the people I have encountered in the sex worker world (who are related but not the same as escorts) are very against "legalisation" as they fear it would lead to registers and no chance to limit or control anonymity.
So unless the moral objections are sorted, I don't see any future in these changes.
In the UK, being paid by a pro sex-worker for services in support of that work is a crime called "Living off immoral earnings", and it's treated quite a bit more seriously than prostitution. How do you tell whether the big guy in the car across the street is really just protection, or whether he's a pimp, taxing a harem of girls with threats of violence?
Modern law has been complicated somewhat by a change in heart. There was an attempt at loosening the rules around prostitution(pre 2009), but they have subsequently been tightened a bit. In short its a mess.
> really just protection, or whether he's a pimp, taxing a harem of girls with threats of violence?
this is where I diverge from sex workers on my opinion on this. They are pushing for discrimination. But this doesn't solve the coercion/security hired help issue.
The only practical way I can see it going away is by allowing sex workers to be fully legalised, as in form a company, have accounts, pay tax, be inspected by environmental health(or would it be CQC?). have three workers, but only pay tax for one? time for an inspection!
There are risks, and the stigma will force people underground. Holland and germany _still_ have a people trafficking problem
I suspect there are better ways, but unless it sex work can be done on the high street(well not literally), we will never truly over come the stigma, and subsequent exploitation of people.
>but the issue the article points out that she as an escort has no access to law, should something go wrong.
She has little to no access to state sanctioned violence. Call it what it is. If she has a business dispute she has no recourse, she can't sue the other party and get the state to put them in a cage if they don't pay. Drug industry also has the same problem and does its violence in-house. Formerly prostitution did in-house the violence necessary to settle business disputes (i.e. pimps) but the internet has changed the business model somewhat.
My experience was not that niche and unique; I tried to consistently show data around how prices might impact your experience. The amount you charge is not correlated with the majority of the questions I asked sex workers.
Your data collection was insightful[1] thank you for that.
All your caveats upfront on the quality of sampling is more than I have seen in many academic papers.
I don't have experience either as service provider or client to give a professionally informed comment here.
However having said that, sex work in general (even only in the United States) starts at lot less than 200-300$/hour in the lower end of the your study[2]. It is a great study and amazing subject testimony but it does only cover mid to high end of the spectrum.
As a basis for policy making covering the lower end of the spectrum and cover specifc policy issues and also cover other stakeholders like healthcare, law enforcement, welfare etc would be important.
I am sure there are lot more qualified people than me you are already in touch/working with, however I am happy to offer my help with statistics or code or lit review and publish formally /research proposal if you wish to go down that route.
[1] Your content, there are some parallels with how startups publish quality industry reports as a brand recognition strategy that I found very interesting.
[2] you have indicated the limitations in many places quite clearly am not finding faulting with your study .
In some Nordic countries, it's not illegal to sell sex, but it is to buy it. What do you think about that? Do you think making the men fear the law, but not the women, would do anything to help the women?
I guess the government's objective is to kill the business completely, which is about as realistic as prohibiting alcohol.
It lets SWERFs pat themselves on the back and feel good by pretending they're not punishing sex workers, only the "evil" men who provide sex workers with income. In practice we have seen in both Sweden and Norway that police systematically pressure landlords and hotels to evict sex workers from rented apartments/rooms under threat of pimping charges. Immigrant sex workers have been deported after going to the police to report crimes.
With "systematically pressure", you can actually say "tries to enforce the law"[1], if they're aware that the premise is used for swapping sex for money, they need to make it stop. Simply paying for a not-for-work apartment or should not fall under that legal space, though.
They really don't need to. They are kicking people out of their homes because of a law that shouldn't exist. They could just not prioritize it and free up resources for other crimes.
Laws against sex work traditionally also make victim(involuntary or forced workers or trafficked) also the criminal.
It is extremely hard to differentiate who is involuntary legally even if there was strong provisions for it and sex workers mostly can not pay for expensive legal counsel who can make that case.
Nordic laws are an attempt to not decriminalize sex work at the same time not punish the workers at all.
I think that situation is somewhat absurd. People in general don’t think sex between consenting adults is wrong, so why is it suddenly when money is exchanged? And, at least, Sweden still has the law that any form of procurement of prostitution is illegal, which means it is still impossible for a prostitute to for example legally pay a guard, or even use the money to pay rent.
This increases competition of sex workers for johns, artificially drives prices down, gives johns greater bargaining power over sex workers, and doesn’t fix the problem of johns trying hard to remain anonymous and requiring situations where you’re less able to go to the police if you wanted. Sex workers hate this.
I am aware of her view from the article. The approach I believe is more aimed at involuntary victims not being further victimized or being threatened with being reported to law enforcement as a mechanism of control. The sex workers Aella is sampling and interacting with may or may-not be a representative of this segment or Nordic countries have bigger problems with this than in United States
I don't have an opinion(or data) on whether this is effective or is good approach or not, just wanted point out that it is less about driving demand down, they are not trying to criminalize johns(it already was) but trying to address issues on the workers side perhaps ineffectively.
But in the current situation the buyer will be a criminal whether the sex worker is there voluntary or as a victim of trafficking, or even underage. So it's very unlikely a buyer would ever report to the police if they suspect that the sex worker is there involuntary or is abused by her pimp.
The law is supposedly there to protect the sex workers, but you don't do that by forcing into hiding and making it unlikely that any crimes against them will be reported by anyone else.
If they really cared about the sex workers they would instead make it easy for them to get anonymous support with health, in particular mental health, and drug abuse problems. And institute a hotline for sex buyers to call without risk getting into any legal troubles if they suspect that a sex worker needs any help for whatever reason.
I don't think that's true. I know a former escort pretty well and she's told me a lot about her work. It lines up very well with the article, except that she didn't have a high opinion of the very high end/expensive escorting because there simply isn't enough business available at the $1200/hr level. At least, not in Europe. It worked out much better for her to charge a more regular price and work full time.
Otherwise the rest is the same. Most clients are whatever. A few she got to know well and liked. She worked with another person who did screening for her, etc.
Perhaps the regular price for your friend is high end equivalent of 1200 ?. The author strongly says the population of an area makes a big difference in the rates you can charge.
Also mean income (as measured by her study of other workers) is $100,000 with her average rates of her sample around 500-600.
Effectively
= F(x)(y)(z)
X - number of people earning 200x the hourly rate
Y - % of that interested in paying for sex[1]
Z - relative beauty rank among service providers[2] in that area
You cannot control beauty much but you could change for location and optimize for all the factors to get best rate[3]. Or optimize for total money depending on what is preferred.
[1] age is strong factor so demographics is a good proxy metric.
Also perhaps friction with law is proxy for cultural acceptance and can be numerically scaled : fully legal, decriminalized, or criminal with quantum of punishment for scaling. And degree of enforcement measured by number of arrests / convictions etc.
[2] probably being 9 in LA wouldnt be the same as say Wyoming( demand would be lesser as a counter pressure)
Well they all tour because otherwise they saturate demand after a week or two in a local area. It's not about big disparities in local earning potential. Guys like novelty and even the ones that pick a girl and stick with her can't afford to come all the time.
No, prices are almost standardized, at least in the 'normal' escorting world. I was surprised by this at first. My belief had always been that it'd be super competitive and the hottest girls would charge the highest prices, but it's not like that. Turns out guys don't really care that much about what a girl looks like beyond a baseline level of beauty, which is why so many can get away with hiding their face.
What does matter a lot is what special services are offered (e.g. dominatrix stuff has a different price), and customer retention, which is 100% about whether you're nice and make the guys feel happy. The most successful girls are the ones that develop a loyal customer base. A few men even follow the girls around as they tour, but that's rare. Girls who are cold, uninterested etc don't get repeat custom and exhaust the area quite quickly.
Whether to go high end or not probably depends a lot on how much else you have going on in life. Aella presumably has lots of other projects like OnlyFans, social media etc. This girl was a full timer. It was her job, and she worked pretty long hours (not anymore). She didn't use social media or create websites or whatever. That's normal. Most escorts use ad sites but they aren't creating dedicated websites for themselves. This girl doesn't even use social media at all, not even in her personal life (and never did, and she's not old).
I did ask her once about the high end work but she indicated that at these sorts of prices you could get maybe one client a month, which just wasn't enough to be interesting given she could be making thousands per day reliably by charging a more normal price (a few hundred an hour). And of course with fewer customers you're a lot more exposed to one of them not coming anymore. The people saying "wow $1200/hr is a lot" are right, I suspect only in Silicon Valley are there a large enough percentage of über-rich but unlucky-with-women people to pay those sorts of rates. Most guys visited her around payday, it was a very cyclical business.
If you do ever get to know an escort on a personal level, or especially more than one, be aware that this is a world that will seem - to the average office worker at least - astoundingly racist. It's touched on in the article but is something else that surprised me a lot. All the girls have strong opinions about different races and a large number demand to know a client's race before they turn up and will simply refuse clients of particular races. There is no stigma or shame associated with such discussions or policies. In escorting there are no HR departments to tell people what to think, 'diversity' isn't a thing, they're all independent or at most work with one or two other girls who are just like them. Learning about this made me reflect a lot on to what extent the middle class office/tech world obsession with anti-racism is a function of the heavy level of filtering that goes on at the front door as part of selecting for skills, university, background etc. The belief that everyone is culturally homogenous and race is just a pigment, just doesn't fly amongst escorts. They learn to generalize about their client base very quickly. To them the link between race and culture is both real and of critical importance.
Interesting and insightful information. I wouldn't think $1000/ hour as lot from consultant PoV. The billable hours are only small part of the hours compared to time put in other related work, in this case activities like screening, adverts, keeping fit, healthcare, accessories, photo-shoots adverts etc. At the same time the sense I get from your post is few hundred/hour as mid range and not high end, maybe it is my lack of knowledge of how this works, but to me it feels like even that is expensive/high-end for most people out there.
I am surprised that saturation can happen in 2 weeks. Unless I am completely clueless about this, that is probably maybe 20-25 appointments (having more than sex 3-4 times a day especially professionally(she seemed to do most of the work) must be incredibility exhausting ). Even if more was possible I can't manage to schedule more than 3 external work meetings a day that is not video conference, scheduling definitely must be more challenging than that here.
It seems pretty small pool if saturated after only 20-25? Perhaps the screening process or narrow advertising ability ( only few platforms allow/ expensive) limiting the reach or competition is pretty heavy at this price point perhaps.
What you are describing regarding race is they find putting race a filtering criteria helps keep screening easier (Somewhat analogous to companies only hiring from tier-1 universities etc ). Better screening leads to better results in hiring rather than arbitrary criteria, I can attest to this in hiring, perhaps it applies here as well but it usually cheaper /easier to implement criteria than screen candidates better for companies. If institutional resources don't do it well, independent workers can hardly be expected to do better. I don't think anything is wrong in sex workers applying race or any type of criteria, it is risky and vulnerable business without any legal or social support, they have to err on the side of caution if they can.
I am not sure there has been exploration of the emotional stress and challenges for the client too. Imagine being rejected often(race or not) even when you are ready to pay for sex on top being unable to attract partners normally that would be quite hard to accept for anyone.
Also the amount of personal information clients are expected to share and references they need to have (while I understand why it is being asked) is pretty steep. There are so many vectors this information may leak from and could damage your life/marriage, lead to arrests etc. That has got to be stressful too.. I would be totally paranoid towards sharing any PII, I guess a good chunk of rich men in the valley would also hesitate on that.
Only 3-4 appointments would have been considered a bad day, by this woman. You'd think it'd be exhausting but they are usually young and have a lot of energy, and 3-4 hours work is a lot less than most people do per day. The men come to them usually. For the high throughput cases they team up with another girl who pretends to be them on the phone and handles the scheduling and screening because that's also a full time job.
So within two weeks (working 6-7 days per week) it's easy to pack in like 80 different punters and there's a limited supply in most towns. Most men aren't visiting, and there are plenty of other girls competing for the business. In a big city sure you can't saturate it but there's also correspondingly much more competition and the police are more active, so some of them prefer to avoid the cities and stick to the smaller conurbations.
Most men don't share any PII. They pay in cash and may or may not use their real names. If they get "banned" it's the phone number that gets banned.
I guess that's another aspect that differs from what I heard, then. I don't think it's normal for customers to share their real identity or be required to do so.
> so making any judgements would not be meaningful as OP was doing
The OP's judgment was that he saw no reason why this escort's business should be illegal. That's not a judgment on whether other forms of prostitution should be legal.
He said "this stuff" , which i assumed to mean escorting in general, he would have been more specific if he meant only hers ?
Also it hard from government to legalize only some form of prostitution over others even if politically that is possible, practically impossible to enforce.
Sure, escorting businesses like hers, where there's clearly no victim being trafficked or abused.
Also it's not at all difficult to legalize only some forms of prostitution. Consider this analogous situation: it's hard for a government to legalize only some forms of cutting people with knives, but we seem to do fine legally distinguishing surgery from assault with a deadly weapon.
How do they lose their jobs? I get that a dealer who just sold weed now has to compete with legal alternatives or leave the sector. How so with sex work? You think the increased competition would put them out of work?
What is a marginalized worker in the cannabis sector?
I think you are over estimating a cross over between these customers. Cheap Mexican brick weed is still being sold because legal cannabis is pricing poorer users out of the legal market.
Legal stores are employing people legitimately and paying taxes, so I don't mind if some dealers now have to quit or diversify. The more jobs we have in legal drugs the fewer required in the illegal drug trade. This is a net positive to society.
One of the arguments of legalisation/decriminalisation/whatever you want to call it is that it brings it out from being underground and anyone can call law enforcement. However given the relationship with law enforcement in the US I’m not sure how well that would work.
I don’t think the author intended to talk about men as a class and all the politics that comes with it, and as a man I would hate for discussions about my gender’s politics to be based specifically on sexual transactions. I mean, she had to talk a lot about her own safety and boundaries here. Not a very good sign for me.
Safety and boundaries also come up with taxi drivers, day laborers, pizza delivery folks, and many others - and objectively they end up dead more often near as I can tell.
Most folks here live pretty safe and cushy lives that the majority of humanity doesn’t get to enjoy. Real life for most people requires understanding and defending these things and making conscious decisions to protect them. it doesn’t require someone be doing sex work for it to be that way.
Treating men who hire prostitutes with respect is kind, but not necessarily honest. More or less a requirement is that they not care if the person they're having sex with hates it. They're a distinct class of people and not reflective of all men.
I'm honestly not sure how I feel about it. I don't like the weird denial about that aspect of the transaction. It makes it difficult to trust the rest of her writing.
I saw escorts for a couple of years. It was often weird, when I just didn’t click with the woman, but I met a few really awesome people.
There are other down sides to escorting. One of the women I had seen a couple of times, was later murdered. They ended up catching the killer- another escort, I don’t know why. It was hard to grieve; we were not real close; her family probably didn’t want clients showing up at the funeral or any other reminder like flowers.
I ended up falling in love with one of the women I met and we dated for a while. It was a serious emotional roller coaster being in love with someone who was having sex with other men until she was ready to “go exclusive”. But in the end we got married after she retired.
Now it’s ten years later. We have a son and are still happy as can be.
If you’re thinking about seeing escorts, remember that since intimacy with other people is involved, there are often strong emotions as well.
I got into sex work because I was homeschooled in a borderline fundamentalist Christian cult my whole life and expected to become a housewife. My parents made too much money for me to qualify for aid for me to go to college, but refused to help me at all financially or cosign on any loans. So at 19 I went to work on a factory floor for 50-60hr weeks with no education and no prospects, and I would go multiple days in a row without seeing the sun.
So yeah, I worked hard and did what I could and I decided that I would prefer sex work over that life.
My posts may seem harsh because I am frustrated by peoples' lack of understanding that being able to work as a sex worker is a *privilege* (to borrow a woke term) that poor men simply do not have. A poor man in your position would have no choice but to keep working these low paying jobs. It is ironic to me that leftists who keep calling everyone privileged will willingly ignore this obvious fact because in their worldview men are privileged by default.
Why not? You could be the loverboytoy of older cougars, or be the fuckpiece for gay- or bisexually oriented man. If that's not your thing you still could join the military and be cannonfodder.
> weird analogies claiming that whoring (renting out your body for money) is just like physical labor, which is fscking insane.
> How is being sexually penetrated by a stranger, ejaculated on, etc... anything like a man doing manual labor?
well we've found our misogynist
> Why is she even a single-mom in the first place?
right, because women have bodily autonomy and basic health care services available to them everywhere. yes i am talking about abortion
seriously, why the hell share this disgusting tirade?
edit: wow i see this isn't your only misogynistic comment
> At least a woman can take the easy way out and become a prostitute. A man has no such "luxury". Society does not pity weak men the way it pities weak women. [1]
you realize you are the one referring to women who do sex work as 'whores'....
> You already have bodily autonomy, you can a) make sure you use a condom or better yet, an IUD b) refrain from sex unless you are OK with getting pregnant.
again showing your misogynist colors; where is male contraception? where is the vasectomy in your list of recommendations/strategies?
> ignore the choice aspect of having sex in the first place.
seriously, you are digging such a deep hole here
> Maybe it is not clear to some people that sex is first and foremost a means of reproduction, and not just pleasure?
You might as well say the same thing about software developers. Instead of working honest jobs with their hands like most people, they just have to sit in a chair and be smart. Even if they get a real job, when the times get rough they will just go back to developing. Where is personal responsibility? Where is dignity? Making an effort to make an honest living?
No you may not. You are once again confusing people who rent out their time and those that rent out their bodies (prostitutes). You are really clutching at straws here trying to make prostitution morally equivalent to every other job in the market.
It is not me who is confused. In either case selling time IS selling limited power over yourself, the use of your capabilities. My employer pays me to think about their problems and solve them with my brain (and fingers). A client of a sex worker pays them to use other mental skills and body parts.
How is one different than the other? There are many jobs that you would consider "normal" that are far more dangerous (e.g. logging or deep sea fishing), or where you are treated with much less dignity either directly (customer support, etc.) or indirectly (a modern warehouse job where you are a glorified manipulator attachment); in almost any jobs, workers could be exploited, trafficked, etc.
What in particular (with some basis in physical reality) makes sex work special compared to all of those?
It is the sexual act itself that makes it special, which is why I'm against simply abstracting away all jobs to "using mental skills and body parts". A client of a hitman also pays them to use mental skills and body parts. How is being a hitman different than being a software engineer?
Sex is something women do not generally give out easily, especially to men they are interested in dating for the long term. Sex is also an intimate act that strengthens the bond between a couple. By selling sex, the woman devalues herself in the eyes of men. Why do women make guys wait for the Nth date before they have sex with them, if not for the sole purpose to make the guy think that the woman is of high value? You know, that she doesn't just sleep with anyone just like that.
Ask yourself this:
1. Would you marry or date a woman who does sex work?
2. Would you be OK with your daughter/sister doing sex work?
Then ask yourself the same questions after s/sex work/software engineering/g and tell me if you get the same answer.
Being a hitman is more likely to have actual moral consequences affecting other people, although e.g. a hitman killing a warlord might be more moral than a software developer working on Great Firewall.
All of the rest comes down to baseless mental hangups, although e.g. withholding random sex has basis in safety considerations. There's also reputational damage, but that cannot be used to to justify reputational damage, that would be circular. It sadly has to be managed, though, so even those without mental hangups and safety concerns might withhold sex.
The answers are "yes, probably" and "yes, if that's the best option in terms of income and safety". To the extent that it gives me pause, I can recognize those are just bugs in my thinking. It's often helpful to analyze your reactions and conclude they are broken, not trust your gut with no justification, e.g. instinctively get angry when someone cuts you off in traffic, or in this case are instinctively disgusted by sex work.
There is clearly a difference. You can pretty much tenuously claim that every type of job affects your body/health in some way, but there is a difference between doing manual labor to being literally f*cked in the ass. (Had to use the bad language to get the point across)
> Instead of working honest jobs with their hands like most people, they just have to sit in a chair and be smart
if you want an even more bulletproof argument you could add that most tech workers are overpaid because they are benefitting from the rents/royalties extracted from intellectual property by the propertied class
I felt very sorry when she said it's difficult to take deposits because payment processors are cruel, that she can't report a horrible client to police, that the govt refuses to acknowledge the work but takes the taxes, and all the precautions escorts have to take against cops. This work should be legal.
> You can in fact get issued an escort license in some cities (e.g., San Francisco or Grand Chute, or Jefferson County, WA). I don’t know if this is a good idea, neither I nor anybody I know has applied for this, though I seriously considered. It’s possible it might grant you some legal protection, but also possible it might give you some legal issues, as it puts a lot of information about you in a government file that clearly states you are in fact an escort.
Based on that, from an escort viewpoint, the legal protections are not a worthy tradeoff for privacy.
Ultimately, in the context of the country/culture, legal protection is a progressive position, but it's not sufficient, unless complemented by a degree of anonymity. Not sure how that could work, though!
It seems clear to me anyway that what she was referring to is a similar trap marijuana growers have here in CA and other legal states. Namely that just because SF gives you a permit doesn’t make it legal (in that everyone who could come arrest you would not), and it may actually make it worse by putting you in a database of ‘known offenders’ for the next higher level of law enforcement to come after you. The state of California doesn’t recognize any permit in SF, and neither do the Feds, and if she crosses state lines in her work, the feds could go after her for it.
Would they do that right now? Probably not. Would some future different administration? Possibly.
And, since it’s required to use legal names and the like, and these records are permanent, it could be a decade or whatever in the future when politics have changed, or there could be a records leak and now your real legal name and occupation and home address or whatever is all over the Internet, and who knows when or if something weird happens.
Gun owners recently started having their records shared with various universities for instance, which include home addresses, names, and what they own - and have no legal recourse near as I can tell.
> Ultimately, in the context of the country/culture, legal protection is a progressive position, but it's not sufficient, unless complemented by a degree of anonymity. Not sure how that could work, though!
Legal, non-anonymous and socially respectable escort services used to exist, you know. It existed in south india as a practice for hundreds of years before the british came.
"before the british came."
More accurately - before Islamic conquerors came. The Vijayanagara empire was utterly destroyed by the Sultanates.
Devadasi as an institution was shattered first by Islamic invaders - who even record this in their journals. In-fact most Islamic historians explicitly declaim this as liberation of women in India and how Islamic conquest uplifted backward society in that era.
Yes, this is why I've mentioned "in the context of the country/culture". Surely in the country you mention, or I suppose others (e.g. Netherlands) there is no social stigma, but in the USA, there is, and it needs to be taken into account.
Devadasi system :) but it's erased history at this point and I also didn't know about it growing up. For historical sources I'd recommend Domingo Paes's book on Vijayanagara empire and Chola inscriptions in the Tanjore temple.
You can also look up Bangalore Nagarathnamma, Veena Dhanammal, Mylapore Gowri ammal, Coimbatore Thayi, Balasaraswathi, Muddupalani. Some of them have books written on them.
If you'd like more sources, plz let me know -- I'll send some book titles your way.
> Legal, non-anonymous and socially respectable escort services
You can still hire no-sex escorts to accompany you to an event - such as a work event, or anything where you don't want people to think you're a saddo who can't get a girlfriend. I can imagine a closet queen employing such a service.
> the legal protections are not a worthy tradeoff for privacy.
I don't think it really conveys any meaningful legal protections. I suspect it allows you to operate, but it won't mean that you will be treated with the same respect that a non escort would have got.
They are still not allowed to use normal payment providers, they cannot form companies, they cannot operate their own premises, with security (as that would border on prostitution, which is a stupid distinction)
Think of it as the police allowing pot dealers, even though it was still illegal to posses.
She describes in the article how she was essentially raped. Can you explain how legalized prostitution would have helped her in that situation? Because it seems to me that there is no way the guy would have been convicted of rape. Furthermore, future johns would avoid her if they knew that she had filed charges against a previous customer. Having sex with men for money is inherently dangerous and I don't think legalization really makes it much safer.
Why would the guy not have been convicted of rape if he raped her? You're making lots of assumptions to "show" how legalizing prostitution would not make it "much safer", but common-sense tells us that legalization is a good first step to making it a bit safer. In the Netherlands police and social workers sometimes protect the outdoor areas in which prostitutes work (e.g. car parks). Why would that not make their workplace safer?
> future johns would avoid her if they knew that she had filed charges against a previous customer
So maybe she wouldn't tell them. Obviously, legalization should also imply a certain protection of their identities (e.g. if they are witnesses in a trial).
I think you don't know how the justice system operates if you think every charge of rape leads to a conviction. In some jurisdictions prostitution is legal, such as Germany, but, afaik, that has not led to a higher number of johns being sentenced. The idea that legalization would somehow make prostitution seem to me to not be grounded in reality. More it seems like make believe for the customers: "It's not us clients making prostitutes unsafe, it's the damn police!"
Social workers and police can of course make outdoor areas in which prostitutes work safer even if prostitution is not legalized. So that is not an argument in favor of legalization.
I don't think every rape charge leads to conviction, though. Moreover, saying that clients make prostitution unsafe is like saying that drivers make the roads unsafe. What's the point of that?
I didn't present an argument for the legalization of prostitution. In my opinion, there is no need for an argument since it's completely obvious to any normal human being that it is not a crime. Why on earth would selling sex for money be crime? Is it the sex that makes it a crime? What's wrong with sex?
There is a lot of hypocrisy in the discussion of this question, though. People frequently confound other crimes with prostitution that already are crimes and would continue to be crimes after legalization such as human trafficking, rape, coercion, sexual assault, etc.
Besides, it is completely obvious that legalization improves the working conditions of prostitutes. Contrary to what you state, the police cannot make outdoor areas where sex workers work secure if prostitution is illegal, since the police is forced to persecute crimes. They'd have to arrest these sex workers. Consequently, these will conduct their business far away from the police, which is exactly what makes their work particularly insecure when it is illegal. This is just one issue. There are many other reasons why illegal activities are generally less secure than the same activities when they are legal. Illegality attracts all kinds of shady people you can avoid if you are allowed to go legit. That's not even a controversial thesis.
You are using phrases such as "completely obvious", "common-sense", and "not controversial" where they aren't warranted. What is obvious to you may not be obvious to others.
In Europe, laws around prostitution varies a lot. In some countries buying and selling sex is legal, in some only buying sex is illegal, and in others prostitution is completely forbidden. There appears to be no correlation between prostitutes' working conditions and the legality of prostitution. In Germany prostitution is legal, yet a massive number of women are trafficked from Eastern European countries to Germany, ostensibly because they are willing to sell sex cheaper than German women.
Yes, police and social workers can make outdoor areas safer whether or not prostitution is legalized. That's a false dichotomy.
No, these phrases are the right ones and I used them in a very literal sense and deliberately. However, being obvious and not controversial does not imply that there isn't someone who doesn't (want to ) get it. That even happens with mathematical proofs. What annoys me, however, is that you committed the very same fallacy in your reply that I mentioned in the post you replied to - deliberately mixing up highly illegal human trafficking with prostitution in order to somehow argue against the legality of prostitution.
> There appears to be no correlation [...]
Citation needed - but in any case that wasn't the point and you know it. There is no sound argument why people shouldn't sell sex for money, besides religious and other ideological arguments which are not sound (otherwise, why not use them in mathematical proofs, too?). Usually at this point people with ulterior motives shift their rhetoric to arguing that the clients rather than the prostitutes are committing a crime - aka "the Swedish model", where you order a very expensive pizza and it gets delivered by an attractive woman. They then go on to lay out that those clients cause great harm. That's not true either, they cause small harm like in many other stressful customer-oriented jobs such as working as a stewardess. But I'm resting my case here. Suffices to say that going from very high income to zero in a short time is problematic...
> There appears to be no correlation between prostitutes' working conditions and the legality of prostitution. In Germany prostitution is legal, yet a massive number of women are trafficked from Eastern European countries to Germany, ostensibly because they are willing to sell sex cheaper than German women.
The prostitutes country of origin somehow proves that it being legal does make it safer? Where do you take information about this or that country prostitution working conditions from?
> Yes, police and social workers can make outdoor areas safer whether or not prostitution is legalized. That's a false dichotomy.
But that is different topic. The area being safe for general public is not the same thing as prostitutes being protected or able to call cops or able to use those social services.
So if trafficking is illegal why not just crack down harder on trafficking? Your argument is like "online fraud is rampant" let's make purchasing items online illegal because we can't stop the fraud.
Legalization would make it much easier for escorts to coordinate on john screening. See for example the research done by Cunningham/Deangelo/Tripp on the effect of Craigslist shutting down their Erotic Services section. And that paper wasn't even on legalization, just a small piece of normalization that allowed coordination. There is also a paper by Cunningham on the accidental legalization of indoor prostitution in Rhode Island and its effect on crime and violence. Fascinating stuff.
> You might carry away feelings of disgust, shame, or hatred. Not everyone feels like this, but if you do, I would not recommend escorting
Just like mental fatigue (term meant as a catch all) is an integral and non separable part of IT work, the feelings described in the quote are not optional for sex workers! You WILL get burned by all the downsides of escorting, it WILL change how you perceive yourself, it WILL affect your dating life, relationships, etc.
Some are more resilient than others, you can deal with it better or worse and preparation surely helps. But don't think you can have your cake and eat it too.
I've started very open minded about the profession as a young man. Looking back on it I now think it was justification so I can allow myself to date sex workers as they are on average quite attractive, go figure. And while individuals differ and you can find the same issues outside of sex workers, the job guarantees some problems of which I personally I grew tired of. I am currently avoiding the profession for romantic interests and would not recommend anybody I care about to go into it. Discrimination sometime has objective serious motivation, the motives are just lost to some.
Sex work usually is tied to more Cluster B personality disorders, from my experience. But then, plenty of people I've dated (who hadn't ever done sex work) have the same issues.
I'm aware that the demographics that I have experience dating tend to skew high towards mental issues (I'm interested in more drug positive people, among other confounding factors which tend to attract people with preexisting mental issues). A lot of the factors aren't exclusive towards sex work, though- simply having an instagram account with 10K+ followers tend to signal a big difference in behavior, for example.
Given that light falls off at an inverse square rate do you plot the lumnes at source of light, centre of the bed or the observed light at the buttcrack?
If the later, how do you account for different distances from the light source durring a given session?
Clearly there is an opportunity for an entrepreneur to fill this market niche with a lidar smart dimmer light that accounts for the distance of said buttcrack.
I’ve always wondered why nobody’s ever set up a porn-for-hire business (maybe they have) to hide a prostitution business behind whatever laws make pornography legal.
It’d essentially be an escort service where the “John” finances the “shoot” renting your room, equipment, and the girl’s time. They could then take their film and destroy it or distribute it.
"We are a small business with a limited budget - please bring your own recording equipment and find your own venue. Our success depends on releasing only the best material, so please send us only those recordings that you are most proud of to publish". And if the equipment they bring is an iPhone that falls over, well dammit this session was a waste of money.
A guy who wants a relationship may only have sex with a handful of women. While a guy who just wants sex can get into the hundreds. That's hundreds of experiences reinforcing that men only want sex compared to just a few saying the opposite. Samppling bias you could say.
Almost none of the digital issues seem to be around transacting of cash. That part seems solved (via Cashapp or BTC). All pain points stem around one party wanting to hide their identity. While simultaneously verifying their clients' identify in great detail, down to a psych profile! An interesting non-zero sum game ;)
The OP did mention using crypto currency, although implied that it was an unusual thing for sure (in general, and not usual for them either).
> I required deposits of 20% for long appointments (6+ hours), because I had a lot of time booked up that would be a painful loss if they cancelled. Deposits are hard to do because everybody wants anonymity and payment processers are cruel; I typically accepted amazon gift cards or crypto.
Yeah, I am amazed johns are ok with it. Not only paying multiple hundreds of dollars but also disclosing your identity and personal information to someone who won't? I can imagine myself taking many strange deals but this one just sounds like a recipe for disaster.
Do I understand correctly that sex work is still illegal in the US? If so, what's the rationale? Why can't consenting adults do what they want with their body?
It’s illegal everywhere but certain parts of Nevada. When you walk around the streets of Las Vegas you’ll therefore see hundreds and hundreds of fliers for girls.
Today it is a partisan issue and one worked on at a state level. Manhattan’s DA vowed to “no longer prosecute prostitution and unlicensed massage” as of this April.[0] …meanwhile the Texas governor in August made buying sex a felony in August, the first state to ever do so.[1]
I don’t expect any significant national progress on this in my lifetime. But there has been a sea change in blue states over the past generation.
I think this is only in cases where you fake credentials as, or otherwise lead someone to believe, that you’re a licensed professional massage therapist. It’s not the most academically demanding thing, but doing that kind of work on someone you could really hurt them fairly bad if you don’t know what you’re doing whatsoever. So requiring licensure and prosecuting those who fake it makes sense.
Yes, definitely - though you are correct that moderate dems are divided on this issue. There is no such division anywhere on the republican side to my knowledge.
Thus, we’re seeing a push for relaxation of sex worker prosecution in essentially only blue states.
Edit: realizing that I didn't qualify that you'll be hard pressed to find any lawmaker pushing for full legalization of prostitution on either side of the aisle. Right now, the most common laws voted on are w.r.t criminality of 1. the sex workers and 2. the clients.
If a woman is poor, struggling to survive or trying to give a child a decent life in a society and economic system that is very sink or swim, do you consider it "consent" if she agrees to have sex with you so she can pay the rent, or have a decent meal, or buy the drugs she got hooked on dealing with depression and alienation, sold to her by a predatory drug dealer?
Longer answer: assuming there is no direct coercion, like a trafficker ring/pimp involved, I fail to see how this kind of struggle is any different than the single parent working night shifts at WalMart who still needs food stamps to feed the family. Or the low wage worker going to a factory each day ripping chickens apart so you can have your chicken breast and chicken nuggets.
If your theoretical mom can make a living that does not require her to work 14h days in two jobs and never really see her kids, good for her, regardless of whether that involves sex work.
Predatory drug dealers are not exclusive to sex work either. What's the alternative for your drug addicted hooker anyway? A "steady" job is probably out of the question at this point. So... burglary and robbery? I am empathetic to drug addicts and am all in favor of helping them, also at a regulatory level. Things like decriminalizing possession and easy access to a reasonably funded support system (with social workers, etc) and treatment for those willing to take that step. Driving drug addicts, who we as a society do not help enough or who refused our help, into a life of hard crime, taking away their livelihood and/or making them even more vulnerable to abuse (if you're a "lawless" prostitute, then you won't go to the police when you've been beaten up, raped and/or robbed for fear of being arrested yourself) is not a solution to me.
All the resources spent right now punishing prostitutes and their clients could be redirected at fighting the actual criminals (the predatory drug dealers, human traffickers and pimps), and to help and support people struggling with drug addiction or mental illness as well as victims of human trafficking.
I don't get how with prostitution a lot of people always proclaim "but we should ban it entirely because trafficking and pimps and drug dealers!". All the while we do not ban all factory jobs because "there are some sweat shops with defacto forced labor!".
So do you see all of these examples, yours (the Walmat worker, chicken factory worker, etc) and mine (the woman doing sex work out of desperation) as just a fact of life, the nature of things, everyone's gotta do what they gotta do?
Or do you see them all as exploitation?
As manifestations of the inherent injustices of our socioeconomic system?
Or something else?
How do you feel about the description "consenting adults"?
What about a female employee who doesn't stop her boss's sexual advances because he controls her income and career? Is that a transaction between consenting adults?
(I never commented on legality of sex work. I was commenting only on "consenting adults" and... see my other replies.)
>What about a female employee who doesn't stop her boss's sexual advances because he controls her income and career? Is that a transaction between consenting adults?
You're trying to flip the script here. A boss (i.e. a concrete person yielding some form of power over another person) trying to coerce the employee is on the same line as a pimp or human traffickers using coercion (or worse).
I was never talking about that, I was talking about a person who looks at the options in the job market, and figures all on own their that prostitution is the least shitty option available to them. And some prostitutes reportedly even like their job well enough. But even if they don't, they can join the large group of other people who do not like their jobs either, but do it anyway to provide for themselves and loved ones.
> A boss (i.e. a concrete person yielding some form of power over another person) trying to coerce the employee is on the same line as a pimp or human traffickers using coercion (or worse).
By your logic, she can say no. She can "look at options in the job market". She can go get a job at McDonald's. By your logic, its consensual and not coercion. By your logic, the boss is morally free and clear as long a an employee can go find a job somewhere else. At will employment, right?
> I was talking about a person who looks at the options in the job market, and figures all on own their that prostitution is the least shitty option available to them.
If prostitution, which is heavily stigmatized by the society a person lives in and is illegal, starts looking attractive, then there is something wrong, don't you think? The problem is not decriminalization, the problem is that people don't have anywhere to look at if they want a decent life.
> And some prostitutes reportedly even like their job well enough.
Which part of it, stigma, having no rights or a fair chance to get degraded/killed/catch STD/highly reducing their chances of having a romantic relationship?
>they can join the large group of other people who do not like their jobs either, but do it anyway to provide for themselves and loved ones.
You can't provide for yourself and, even more so for you loved ones, by working at McDonalds. You can barely survive.
> There is no coerced consent.
Sure, if you have 2 choices - prostitution or dying from starvation, then it's not coerced consent. You always had a choice to die.
>If prostitution, which is heavily stigmatized by the society a person lives in and is illegal, starts looking attractive, then there is something wrong, don't you think?
I live in a country that doesn't criminalize prostitution. But even in countries where it is criminalized (most of them), it still can be an attractive enough proposition for sure, depending on the circumstances.
Not all prostitutes are those "street workers". A lot of prostitutes are living rather normal lives on the outset, at least in my country. There is plenty of part time prostitutes, too, apparently. Your next door neighbor could be a prostitute, and you won't know it.
Stigmatization surely is a problem, but that is directly correlated with criminalization too (but of course not entirely caused by it). Media plays a big role for sure too, usually portraying every prostitute as either a drug addict, abused, or both.
There is no easy solution, but one can start by stopping to stigmatize prostitutes, starting with ourselves and then with the people we know. Just threat them as well human beings.
>Which part of it, stigma, having no rights or a fair chance to get degraded/killed/catch STD/highly reducing their chances of having a romantic relationship?
Not every prostitute gets regularly degraded and/or abused, or killed. Most of the prostitutes around here probably do not have a much higher chance of being killed than other groups. STDs are another matter. But sure, some jobs are riskier than others. We as a society should make it less risky. The chances of bad things happening to prostitutes skyrockets when you criminalize prostitution and thus take away their chances of reporting crimes without being harassed or arrested by law enforcement themselves. Or when the police dismiss a prostitute reporting a rape because "how can a prostitute be raped?!". Or some child protective services agency shows up to take away your kid, because you dared report you were beaten and robbed by a John.
Then again, I can hardly find any justification for the laws to criminalize prostitution, other than "it leads to more crime". No shit sherlock, it's criminalized, and that brings more crime with it, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy at this point. We have plenty of examples of this happening, like when the US banned alcoholic beverages for a while, and this caused not only speak easys to spring up everywhere, it brought along murder and mayhem, lives destroyed and a vast spike in corruption.
>You can't provide for yourself and, even more so for you loved ones, by working at McDonalds. You can barely survive.
True, and that needs to change.
>Sure, if you have 2 choices - prostitution or dying from starvation, then it's not coerced consent.
Correct, that's life being shitty to you. It's not coercion because coercion requires somebody to make threats. Regardless, they are usually either more than two options, and sadly quite often only the one option of starvation. It seems to me you're advocating taking away the prostitution option, which then leaves only starvation? How is this better?
In a better world, we would only have people going into prostitution who really want it for some reason, instead of outright, desperate economic need. A world were people do not have to work 14h in some shitty factory and still cannot pay their rent, and cannot even dream of owning a house. A world were nobody starves, and everybody has access to fresh, clean drinking water. We don't have such a world. Making this world we actually got worse for these desperate people by criminalizing them does not help anybody, does it?
I don't think that prostitution will ever get destigmatized. This hasn't much to do with the media, and more to do with human nature. Men are usually wary of sexually promiscuous women, and women know that as well (which is why women "slut shame" other women to take them out of the competition). IIRC most prostitutes in Germany are foreign anyway, so even though the pay is high, most German women would prefer to do some other work :).
>I don't think that prostitution will ever get destigmatized.
Fully de-stigmatized? Probably not in our life times, or ever. But the stigma has been on a sharp decline, at least in my parents generation and my generation, as far as I can tell.
>Men are usually wary of sexually promiscuous women, and women know that as well
While this is not entirely wrong, what is considered "sexually promiscuous" has shifted a lot in general. In the "somewhat woker"[0] parts of society you will get shamed for "slut shaming". Moreover, I find with a lot of people the idea that prostitutes are "sexually promiscuous" instead of just doing a job has greatly shifted towards recognizing it's a job and not "sluttiness". Even my late grandma, after watching a few documentaries about prostitution in German, changed her mind[1].
I think visiting a prostitute has a large stigma ("creep"/"perv", "cannot get laid if he does not pay money for it") but the actual prostitution a lot less so now.
>IIRC most prostitutes in Germany are foreign anyway, so even though the pay is high, most German women would prefer to do some other work :).
There is reportedly a sizable chunk of foreign prostitutes, but not a majority, as far as I am aware. With legalization and the internet, it is rather easy to set up your own one-person operation, and that happened/happens a lot, even for foreigners. No need to walk the streets or work in known brothels or red light districts. You can operate in relative anonymity as a one-person operation from some flat or go to customers, after advertising your services online[2]. This affords both the prostitute and their client some privacy.
Or you can work in the larger legal brothels, which then provide security (actual bouncers, not some pimps pretending to provide protection) and other amenities such as that they will advertise their establishment so you don't have to spend time doing that yourself. These legal brothels then charge a flat entrance fee to prostitutes (but do not take a cut of the pay; that would be illegal pimping).
The one prostitute I know socially[3], for example, is German and has rented a flat together with another prostitute (also German) one town over from where she lives (to avoid awkwardly running into clients on the street), where they would provide services to clients, usually alternating who gets to use the flat each day. This works out well for them, time-wise, she says. She also goes to regular clients (to their homes or hotels) after there was a certain level of reputation and trust was established. She says in this system they set up, there is no need for hired security (or a "pimp", not that pimps ever actually provided protection), seeing new clients only after vetting them (also vetting them with other prostitutes, who use online forums to do so; not so much the case in the US after SESTA/FOSTA), and only accepting electronic payments for new clients to leave a money trace the police could investigate if something goes bad and telling the clients as much (US sex workers cannot even get banking once it becomes known to the bank they are sex workers, or reasonably go to the police).
She isn't a high end escort either, by the way. She mentioned charging something like 100 bucks for half an hour as the base rate. I don't really have a frame of reference, but I believe this is neither particularly cheap nor particularly expensive.
[0] And by somewhat "woker" I do not mean the crowd who think antifa is great and tattoo their pronouns on their foreheads, but the section of society which believes e.g. in equal treatment of the genders, that allowing same sex marriage and adoption is not up for debate, or that we have to do something about climate change. I generally would call these people the "sane group", but that's just me.
[1] I remember the time at some family function, when the topic somehow got on legalization of prostitution (it had been already legal for years), my 80-something-at-the-time year old grandpa remarked that they are "sluts", and my grandma of roughly the same age, to everybody's amazement, remarked "Leave them alone! They are just doing a hard job to get by. I saw a lot about that on TV".
[3] On the flip side, this makes it easier to hide human trafficking, too, as trafficker rings can online advertise and rent normal apartments, too, of course.
And yeah, I was curious and/or nosy enough to ask her questions after she revealed what she does for a living, specially about the risks involved and how she mitigates them.
> but one can start by stopping to stigmatize prostitutes, starting with ourselves and then with the people we know. Just threat them as well human beings.
Agree.
>> Sure, if you have 2 choices - prostitution or dying from starvation, then it's not coerced consent.
> Correct, that's life being shitty to you. It's not coercion because coercion requires somebody to make threats.
To pressure, intimidate, or force (someone) into doing something.
I don't see a difference here, drug dealer or shitty life, it's the same life threat with the same outcome. What consent can we talk about here? How prostitution can be not destructive for the psychic health? We can't look at our body as some crutch which you can sell for a couple of hours. Prostitution is destructive for the person and as such, for the whole society. And no, physical labor and repetitive work are not the same as prostitution.
> It seems to me you're advocating taking away the prostitution option,
I wanted to say:
~Not at all. I think it should be decriminalized everywhere, not because there is "no easy solution", but because no one is interested in actually doing smth - same labor as everything else, nothing to see here. Brothels should be forbidden though if they are "for profit".~
but what's next? Let's decriminalize child prostitution? They have nowhere else to go and have to get some money for living, you know? Ah, the age of consent is too high? Let's lower it, kids need to work and there are so many wealthy guys who would like to get some. And, since there is no coercion, it's all fine. In selling organs too - those are you own organs and no one "coerced" you, your choice.
Maybe decriminalization of __adult__ prostitution will make sense only in case smth being done for it's elimination? Like raising minimal wages, better protection of the workers, social security, stuff like that?
But for now, i say, it should be decriminalized the other way - the one who will be prosecuted should be the buyer, for exploiting people in need. And the stigma should go to them instead.
Same could be done about people addicted to heavy drugs and being prosecuted when they are caught with one dosage. Selling heavy drugs should be forbidden, carrying a dosage for yourself - no. And there is at least one country where it worked.
> which then leaves only starvation? How is this better?
It doesn't leave only starvation. It leaves people realizing that they have nothing to lose but their chains. It's not the decriminalization of prostitution we should talk about, but solving the real problems which caused it. DoP will not solve them and after that we will absolutely need to decriminalize something else. Gladiator fights, maybe?
> We can't look at our body as some crutch which you can sell for a couple of hours.
That's a good argument against wage labor in capitalism, but not a specific argument against prostitution as opposed to other, particularly physical, wage labor.
Comparing prostitution to physical labor is no different from comparing selling your organs to prostitution. Indeed, giving away for free a part of what you earned is bad, but giving a part of yourself, be it psychological or physical health(which should not be separated, actually, but lets not complicate things. Lots of things we can lose and still continue to live), is worse.
Its not a comparison, prostitution literally is physical labor...
> is no different from comparing selling your organs to prostitution
...whereas selling organs is not prostitution and vice versa.
> Indeed, giving away for free a part of what you earned is bad, but giving a part of yourself, be it psychological or physical health(which should not be separated, actually, but lets not complicate things. Lots of things we can lose and still continue to live), is worse.
Much wage labor, both physical and otherwise, involves sacrifice of psychological and/or physical health. We have, in fact, a massive labor regulatory and enforcement bureaucracy that exists not to prevent that, but to try to limit it to what is deemed reasonable for each specific job. (Including, where it is legal, for prostitution.)
>Its not a comparison, prostitution literally is physical labor...
>...whereas selling organs is not prostitution and vice versa.
Alright.
> Much wage labor, both physical and otherwise, involves sacrifice of psychological and/or physical health.
And the goal was to reduce those sacrifices overtime. Or so I thought.
> We have, in fact, a massive labor regulatory and enforcement bureaucracy that exists not to prevent that, but to try to limit it to what is deemed reasonable for each specific job. (Including, where it is legal, for prostitution.)
Help me out then. Where is the limit? I mean, at what point we can say:"no, this is unacceptable to decriminalize doing that, even though it can perfectly be classified as labor definition on wikipedia". Why governments prevent trading some stuff, if trading, whatever you trade, is the same labor like everything else and shouldn't be prevented?
Are you a libertarian? I'm asking because discussing all that with people who believe in stuff has no purpose
You are not paid only for physical labor in a company. You are expected to be part of the company culture, which, most of the times, is mental prostitution.
Some Johns will surely try to degrade and abuse prostitutes (outside of a safe, agree-upon role play setting). We call these people "bullies" or even "criminals" (depending on that they do). Cutting off a prostitutes ability to file charges against such people by making her or him fear they will get arrested... well I reiterated that point enough by now, I feel.
Recycled slippery slope FUD "somebody think of the children" argument, used a lots of times, e.g. when "they" claimed that same sex marriages would lead to people marrying their dogs, daughters and children.
I was planning to give you a more detailed response, but after reading this, and the "male capitalist bias" bull post you linked, I am honestly not so keen on spending brain cycles on arguing with you.
From one of your other comments (I just got curious now, after you linked the other poster):
>In capitalistic society everything can be called labour, including selling people, their organs and their genitals for sex.
What the actual fuck is this false equivalency?
Selling people and selling organs is hardly the same as doing some consensual work for paying customers.
I am pretty sure nobody here even made that argument, but I guess it's easier to attack that strawman.
>It leaves something that will make people realize that they have nothing to lose but their chains.
Oh hurray, Marx is alive!
Sorry, but you cannot eat "empowerment" and you cannot break the chains of "famine" or "overpopulation". What's the goal here? Bloody revolution against capitalism towards a collective utopia? This would only work if everybody was pure and virtuous, and that's just not the reality. Even Rousseau acknowledged that.
You can make things fairer, and we should strive to do that. But "breaking chains" rhetoric in this context is counter-productive at best, and destructive at worst, as well as divorced from reality.
> If I was in a situation where I could either prostitute myself (legally, in a safe-enough environment like a legal club with a bouncer) or clean toilets (legally, in a safe-enough enviroment)
Maybe that's because you expect yourself to benefit from it as much as your friend or the girl who wrote the article. Will you disagree that decriminalizing it, just like that, will lead to an increase in competition in that sphere which, in turn, will lead to more and more people agreeing to all kinds of stuff which they wouldn't agree to before? The money will still be there, you will just have to "work harder" to get them, consensually, so some other Aella wouldn't be so picky anymore and will be greatful to have a client who will choke her and call a whore.
I didn't watch interviews with prostitutes, but i watched interviews with pornstars. Whether they want it or not, most of them eventually have to bend as they are getting older and most of them are not educated and/or intelligent enough to save money or invest it into something which can help them get out of this. I couldn't find age statistics in porn but the average, 22, median is more interesting though.
> She'd like to get a better accepted job with better job security that she can still work when she gets older
So maybe that's what we need to talk about?
If you had a choice between toilets and prostitution, it would've meant one thing - you wouldn't be as smart(educated+intelligent) as you are now so your chances to benefit from it would've been low and you would've likely ended with cleaning someone's dirty dick with your mouth instead of cleaning toilets with your hands. Considering that this prostitute was/is your friend, she must be educated and intelligent enough to keep your interest. Why was that the only choice for her, btw? Family violence or smth?
> Recycled slippery slope FUD "somebody think of the children" argument, used a lots of times, e.g. when "they" claimed that same sex marriages would lead to people marrying their dogs, daughters and children.
Oh come on, i didn't expect that you will compare child prostitution to "think about children" and then compare it to gay marriage. The fact that you can compare anything to some stupid religious shit doesn't instantly make those things false, it just makes people afraid to use those comparisons and carefully avoid them in the conversations, as otherwise it will instantly turn into "ah, you are one of those idiots! Not talking to you!" I am yet to develop this brain reflex of "no-no-no, can't say the kid word, bad, bad!" as I don't expect people to get the "gay marriage" reflex.
Kids are just another age group, who(for some unknown reason) are protected from this shit by law. Change it to decriminalizing gladiator fights to the death or work for 112 hours per week - it's all the same in the sense of making it all worse, not better. But you say that until someone is standing behind you with a gun to your head it's all consensual.
> I was planning to give you a more detailed response, but after reading this, and the "male capitalist bias" bull post you linked, I am honestly not so keen on spending brain cycles on arguing with you.
I said "smth like", it was night already and I have problems with concentration: seen a canvas of the message which seemed close to what was on my mind but which i couldn't put into words, but didn't see the other part. I don't know what "male capitalist bias" is and i shouldn't have related to the messages i dont understand. Can remove that part from my message completely - it won't lose anything. Point taken, no hard feelings, my fault
>> _In capitalistic society everything can be called labour, including selling people, their organs and their genitals for sex._
>Selling people and selling organs is hardly the same as doing some consensual work for paying customers.
Ah, right, the slippery slope of consensual work.
People who gave me themselves, part or whole, did that consensually. I'm just a retailer who wants to work honestly and without fear. I sell, you buy. I say, if a person wants to sell their organs or themselves completely, then it should be their lawful right, if there was no coercion. After all, what else do we actually own but the meat on our bones?
> I am pretty sure nobody here even made that argument, but I guess it's easier to attack that strawman.
Why is it a strawman? There is literally no barrier from going down or up on social security ladder but the barrier of public opinion and actions. Decriminalizing stuff, the way it is argued here by the majority, is a try to patch the consequence of the problem and avoidance of the problem itself.
And I already said that i agree with decriminalization of the prostitution, as well as one for using heavy drugs, dont know why you ignored that. Considered it irrelevant?
> Oh hurray, Marx is alive!
Ah, sarcasm which is supposed to mean something but the sarcasm itself. I'm not a marxist, but it's pretty obvious, to me, that most people won't do anything until they really-really-really have nothing to lose, whether Marx is alive of dead.
> Sorry, but you cannot eat "empowerment" and you cannot break the chains of "famine" or "overpopulation".
No shit sherlock, maybe the reasons for overpopulation need a solution too? And not by throwing people into bioreactor, using them to fertilize the soil or making soap, but, you know, education and stuff.
If 42 millions of prostitutes(in 2012, right now it should be much more than that) are being paid, then those money have to come from somewhere. How about using them for raising the quality of life of the people instead of making them have sex for that security(consensually ofc)?
> What's the goal here? Bloody revolution against capitalism towards a collective utopia?
> This would only work if everybody was pure and virtuous, and that's just not the reality.
Wasn't my intention to get into this conversation but ok. The goal is raising the quality of life
You don't get pure and virtuous people by some kind of a switch. It's a longterm goal which should be achieved by increasing the level of education and gradual raise of the quality of life, and, therefore, raising the awareness of society. Right now we have much more people thinking about racism, overpopulation, inequality, global warming and stuff than 50 years ago. Changes are not made by some kind of a global vote, you just need to have a critical mass with enough influence - tetraethyllead gasoline can confirm that.
And, btw, right now we have a choice a choice between bloody revolution for your rights and bloody war for the rights of 1%, haven't you seen the news? And revolutions are much less bloody
> You can make things fairer, and we should strive to do that.
true
> But "breaking chains" rhetoric in this context ...
It really was rhetoric, i had a chance to use it so i did, no harm done. I meant what i wrote above.
> ...is counter-productive at best, and destructive at worst, as well as divorced from reality.
Since when striving for the improvement of the quality of life is counter-productive?
I will not respond to most of what you said, as it's getting rather repetitive, you seem to have made up your mind about how prostitution is exclusively all of the following and worse: necessarily extremely "degrading", "like selling organs and slavery", "leads to pedophilia", is about "sucking dirty dicks". Divorced from reality in other words. I feel like I am talking to a creationist who argues that evolution is just an unproven theory.
But this shit had my blood boiling:
>Considering that this prostitute was/is your friend, she must be educated and intelligent enough to keep your interest. Why was that the only choice for her, btw? Family violence or smth?
She had to be abused in order to become a prostitute? For the sake of the holy fuck...
First of all, aren't we a little bit elitist and superficial? I am friends with her because I like her as a human and she is a nice person and fun to hang out with, not because she is "able to keep my interest" with smarts and education...
She is average smart I would think, and in fact not well educated, tho has a certain natural curiosity to her. She fucked up her education, mostly by cutting classes a lot and partying, leading to bad grades. A rebellious teen at most, no abuse involved (something I kinda have in common with her, that rebellious/carpe diem phase, but I somehow managed to outgrow that phase soon enough to not completely tank my final grades, and still qualified to go to uni).
And prostitution wasn't the only choice for her, even tho thanks to her rebellious years and bad academic record, her choices were limited. That's why she started working as a cleaner in that hospital (another option) where I met her. She could have gone back to school, or gone to vocational school instead (she had/has supportive parents and a good relationship with them). No idea why she did not, or rather only in recent years started looking into that possibility.
I myself was working in that hospital only because German males at the time still had to either do mandatory army service or mandatory civil service, and I opted for the latter. We got talking at the "smokers bus stop" (basically a little space with a roof looking like a bus stop right outside of the hospital and the only place where anybody was allowed to smoke), then started hanging out after shifts. We lost touch after my service was over and left, and left home for uni to another town. But a couple of years later we ran into each other again, and that's when I learned she changed professions (well, after a while she told me, while initially being secretive about it).
She wasn't abused/hadn't been abused, she wasn't driven into prostitution by outright desperation (she wanted a less shitty job, but that's not the same), she wasn't pimped out by a "boyfriend", she wasn't forced into it by anybody or anything. She wasn't in debt either, as far as I know, just shittily paid for long hours, which only allowed her to rent a somewhat small and shitty apartment, drive a shitty used car, go on a low-end vacation every couple of years, and so on, and desired a life less shitty.
In fact, she told me she was rather skeptical at first and took a long time deliberating if she should do it, did a lot of online research first, and then took cautious steps into that business, doing it very part time for a time while still working her cleaner job, and then decided it was working well enough for her and a lot better than that cleaner job, and made the jump to full time. What initially gave her the idea of becoming a prostitute I don't know.
> how prostitution is exclusively all of the following and worse...
You never explained why we should exclusively decriminalize prostitution but not everything else which perfectly fits into wiki's labor definition
> necessarily extremely "degrading"
not necessarily. There is a tip of the iceberg - girls who write "fantastic articles", "informative, well-written, thoughtful, human, and funny",- whose rights you are trying to defend here.
> "leads to pedophilia"
I think, you should've said "leads to gay marriages", for consistency
> "like selling organs and slavery"
you never explained where should we stop and why prostitution is different
> Divorced from reality in other words.
Alright
> I feel like I am talking to a creationist who argues that evolution is just an unproven theory.
I know that there are more than 2 opportunities and I figured out that you are from a developed country, so I chose a more likely reason to go into prostitution, according to my divorced from reality views.
> First of all, aren't we a little bit elitist and superficial? I am friends with her because I like her as a human and she is a nice person and fun to hang out with, not because she is "able to keep my interest" with smarts and education...
I don't think so. Humans have a huge variation in intelligence so understanding each other may be a big problem. I have acquaintances who are nice people but I feel very uncomfortable talking to them - it's like talking to big, adult-size kids. I also have nice acquaintances, who are like on the edge of understanding, from the left side of the scale - sometimes annoying but hanging out is fun. And I have those with whom I feel like we have a complete understanding(not agreement), and those with whom I myself feel like an idiot and need to put lots of effort to just keep up.
> And prostitution wasn't the only choice for her, even tho thanks to her rebellious years and bad academic record, her choices were limited.
Is technical college in Germany somehow a bad choice, compared to cleaning? Good grades are not needed and you get payed while studying, or it's not as cool as internet describes it?
That was interesting, thank you for writing.
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Let's cut everything I said before as irrelevant so you won't feel bad talking about it. Let's talk about what you wrote as I need your help to understand it, no sarcasm intended.
Prostitution is no different from work in McDonalds or even cleaning toilets, they are all labor. Alright. But then we get into a situation where .
So, if prostitution is just the same, we get serious inequality: women, by birth, have better opportunities than men. Men are stronger but it doesn't bring much to their table: blunt force is not smth of a high value nowadays.
Therefore, when women tell me about their serious or not so serious financial troubles, I should suggest them to go into prostitution and give them a link to this topic which explains how to do it right. Yeah, people don't like advises they didn't ask for, but I just want to help - helped a couple of girls to get junior positions in IT when they didn't even consider it as an option, thinking that it immensely hard, but IT not even remotely close to the benefits of the prostitution. Most(I'd say absolute majority, but I'm not inclined enough to google statistics) IT positions, for which someone is willing to pay you, are extremely repetitive and boring, whether it's junior, middle or senior, and, if you come there for the money only, it will be a trouble getting higher on the salary ladder. In a country I am from, a highly qualified senior I know gets around 2600$ and he is not very thrilled about this job as he been doing it for 10 years but he likes the salary and that's enough for him. If we legalize prostitution so prostitutes could get pensions and other security benefits, it wins, hands down. And I'm comparing it to mental labor because it's hard for me to imagine physical labor to compare.
Alright, prostitution is the same and it wins.
But there's a problem here - if I advice that to the women/girls I know, I can 100% tell you that the response I will get is a slap or, more likely, a punch in the face, a kick in the balls or a combination from those. What am I missing here? Do you think it's because they are just not as open-minded as you are?
>You never explained why we should exclusively decriminalize prostitution
I - and others too - have repeatedly pointed out how prostitution is not different from other already legal physical labor, but here goes the summary: it's consensual, something adults do, it can be relatively safe[0], it isn't necessarily more of a health risk than a lot of other jobs both for physical and mental health[0].
Selling organs clearly does not fit that. Slavery does not either. Child prostitution does not either. Your argument seems to be "if we allow any paid work, this will lead to child exploitation". "If we allow factory work, then it's a slippery slope to legalizing child factory work", "If we allow prostitution, then it's a slippery slope to legalizing child sex work". No, it fucking isn't, no matter how often you repeat that argument, slightly rephrased.
Your only other objection I keep hearing is that that genitals are somehow magical and very different from other organs so that when you use them for work instead of pleasure they will immediately fuck with your head, unlike say your brain or hands which are fine to use for work. And that prostitution is somehow degrading in itself [citation needed] most of the time. All those claims are not just outright wrong, they are on a level of "the earth is flat" to me.
> chose a more likely reason to go into prostitution,
How exactly do you figure it's "the more likely reason"? What informed that? Do you have any foundation to make this claim?
>Is technical college in Germany somehow a bad choice, compared to cleaning? Good grades are not needed and you get payed while studying, or it's not as cool as internet describes it?
That's a misunderstanding of how the system works. First of all, you don't get paid for visiting any school. You usually do not have to pay (much) either if it's a state run school (private schools are different and can be quite expensive).
We have state-run vocational schools, as well as private vocational schools. If you want to learn a trade, such as plumber, hairdresser or welder or sales or whatever, you have to find a company hiring you as an apprentice and then that company will educate you on the practical hands-on side while the vocational school will give you a good chunk of theory specific to your job and/or more generally applicable knowledge (e.g. they might teach you how to write a proper, legal invoice) as well as additional general education (math in particular). But here is the thing: finding a company to hire you as an apprentice is hard, and it can be quite impossible depending where you live if your final school grades are shit. Too many applicants for open spots, and there will be applicants with better grades. If you get an apprenticeship, you get paid a small salary by the company, but it's usually not enough to live on your own, often not even enough to live with room mates. So you can either "freeload" from your parents or take out a special state student loan[1] (or somehow have money saved). An apprenticeship lasts between 2 years and 4 years, depending on the specific trade. Expect 700 bucks a month if you're a plumber apprentice, before taxes. The pay is worse now than ever in most apprenticeships, by the way. My mom in todays equivalent money would have been paid more than double what she would get now as an apprentice in the same vocation.
Then there is what one could call "technical colleges", which are a little like community colleges I suppose. You get a "uni-degree-light" (Fachhochschulabsluss). E.g. you can become a "programmer" but you cannot become a "computer scientist" or "computer engineer" (for those degrees you have to go to a university). Applicants must however have a certain school or equivalent degree ("Fachhochschulreife"), and a lot of people don't (my friend did not). You can get this required degree by either staying a little longer in school, go back to a (night) school or you automatically get it if you get an accredited vocational degree[2].
Then there is full universities. In order to get in, you have to have the highest school degree (Abitur) or a completed masters degree or diploma from a technical college. So if you do not have either, you can go back to (night) school to get your Abitur. Certain fields of study, like medicine, have additional grade requirements ("numerus clausus") because there are far too many applicants (with certain exceptions, e.g. if you can demonstrate you had a "problematic" upbringing for example).
There are basically six ways you can leave regular school as a kid: no degree (congrats, nobody will ever hire you for anything except the worst menial jobs), Hauptschule ("main school" or "basic school", very hard to get an apprenticeship with just that, but not impossible) after grade 9, Realschule (mid school, you usually go the vocational school/apprenticeship route after that) after grade 10, Erweiterter Sekundarstufenabschluss I (basically Realschule+, the difference being your grades were good enough to allow you to stay in school and pursue the Abitur) after grade 10, and Abitur after grade 12 or 13 (qualifies you to go to university, technical colleges or you can of course go to a vocational school, but a lot of companies will not offer you an apprenticeship because they consider you "overqualified"). The "Fachhochschulreife" you can get by going the Abitur route, but leaving with good enough grades after grade 11, or visiting a "Fachoberschule" after you already earned a Realschule degree (Fachoberschulen often offer night school for people getting their Fachhochschule while working an unskilled job during the day).
Everything is rather complicated, I know. But it also gives you a lot of options and different way to get there.
The point is: you don't get paid going to school, and you don't get paid enough being an apprentice. I am sure that some people earn money from prostitution and other sex work to finance their time in school as opposed to taking out loans or work dead end side jobs with a lot worse pay-by-hour rate. Tho the common trope is that your waiter is probably a student (which is true enough that it became a political issue when gastronomy was shut down during corona and a lot of students got into financial dire straits thanks to it).
>If we legalize prostitution so prostitutes could get pensions and other security benefits, it wins, hands down.
That's what happen in Germany, by the way. Prostitution counts as regular work and thus you get access to all kinds of benefits and access to the national retirement insurance, workplace injury insurance, etc.
>So, if prostitution is just the same, we get serious inequality: women, by birth, have better opportunities than men.
Uh... what?
>But there's a problem here - if I advice that to the women/girls I know, I can 100% tell you that the response I will get is a slap or, more likely, a punch in the face, a kick in the balls or a combination from those. What am I missing here? Do you think it's because they are just not as open-minded as you are?
The thing is, you'd get that slap under the current situation, where prostitution is not legal were you are and highly stigmatized.
Then again, such advice would be misleading regardless. Prostitution is not necessarily better than other jobs. Other jobs often offer a guaranteed salary, while prostitution does not as you're usually self-employed. Self-employment usually has other legal and practical ramifications as well, in general. Prostitution usually has a limited time you can keep doing it, because demand for your services will get lower and lower as you get older (usually), so you have to earn enough and save enough to finance your early-compared-to-other-jobs retirement, or be prepared to change professions later.
I personally would not advice anybody to take up prostitution as their only profession, because of the uncertain financial future, even in a world were it's legal and does not carry an excessive stigma. I won't tell anybody not to take up that profession either, if I get the feeling they carefully considered the pros and cons. Then again, I wouldn't advice anybody to pick up any kind of other self-employment either, for the same reason, unless they well researched it first and are confident it's going to work out for them.
[0] If you do it legally and aren't cut off from the police and welfare systems, and take the right precautions. As with many other jobs, if you do not take the right precautions, you can be harmed. As with other jobs even with the right precautions you can only minimize the risk of harm, not eliminate it entirely. Some jobs are explicitly about you putting yourself into harms way, like soldiers, security and bouncers, bodyguards, police, fire fighters. Other jobs have an inherent risk like cab drivers, construction workers, etc. There are jobs that can be very bad for your mental health, like again soldiers and police, EMTs and nurses and doctors, child protective service and social workers, and a plethora of others. And dull, repetitive work does not have a reputation of being particularly good for your psyche either.
[1] Called BaFöG. Basically a no interest loan, and you only have to pay back if you can, but how much of a loan you depends on your means and the means of your parents.
[2] Vocational degrees are usually not given by the vocational school, or the company which had you as an apprentice, but by a trade organization. It normally requires passing a final round of exams administered by those organizations.
> I - and others too - have repeatedly pointed out how prostitution is not different from other already legal physical labor, but here goes the summary: it's consensual, something adults do, it can be relatively safe[0], it isn't necessarily more of a health risk than a lot of other jobs both for physical and mental health[0].
Oh, those are tight boundaries. What does "something adults do" mean, though?
> Some jobs are explicitly about you putting yourself into harms way
> Other jobs have an inherent risk like
> There are jobs that can be very bad for your mental health
> And dull, repetitive work does not have a reputation of being particularly good for your psyche either.
So the goal is to reduce that harm and risk, not in using their existence as justification.
> Selling organs clearly does not fit that.
Kidney donation and liver donation are considered safe and dont even seem to affect life expectancy much(kidney does but its like a year or smth). And you can also sell one of your eyeballs, if you have 2. All those are not harmful and you can perfectly function afterwards. What's wrong with selling organs, i don't get it.
> Slavery does not either
The difference between slavery and work at Mcdonalds is just the level of exploitation, it perfectly fits. Prostitution is just sexual slavery, no big deal
> Child prostitution does not either.
[x] consensual
[x] something adults do
[x] relatively safe
[x] according to you, it isn't necessarily more of a health risk than a lot of other jobs both for physical and mental health(ofc, talking about kids who reached puberty)
You seem to be afraid of kids. Kids are allowed to work part time almost everywhere, because they are supposed to study, not because they are magical. What's the difference?
> Your argument seems to be "if we allow any paid work, this will lead to child exploitation". "If we allow factory work, then it's a slippery slope to legalizing child factory work", "If we allow prostitution, then it's a slippery slope to legalizing child sex work".
It's about the direction. If we start gradually increasing the length of the working day on a factory, we will get back to child factory work, eventually, because that's where we started. That's how lifting of restrictions works, one be one. And no, there is no physical law from which you want a citation and if there is no physical law, then it doesn't exist, i already understood your position. What you are trying to protect here, as many others, is "yes, i did take all his means for survival but I didn't kill him, shitty life did. And he would've died anyway, so who cares."
> Your only other objection I keep hearing is that that genitals are somehow magical and very different from other organs so that when you use them for work instead of pleasure they will immediately fuck with your head, unlike say your brain or hands which are fine to use for work. And that prostitution is somehow degrading in itself [citation needed] most of the time.
Sex and intimacy, and intimacy of sex are one of those things that turn a good friendship into a relationship. The word intimacy is kinda self-explanotory. I don't know, read a psychology book about human sexual relationships or smth.
> And that prostitution is somehow degrading in itself [citation needed] most of the time.
I don't know what percentage of people made a "thoughtful analyses" prior to using it as a source of income, but i presume it's less than 10. So yes, most of the time it is.
> All those claims are not just outright wrong
You just don't like it because you decided that liberalizing your mind in one way but not the other is the right thing to do without much facts to support it. The positive effect you know about, on a tip of the iceberg in Germany, is not much evidence, would've been if we knew for sure where forced ends and voluntary starts. They say that decriminalization in New Zealand led to some improvements, but that's a unique case - 5 million people on an island, - and we have no idea about it's scalability.
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But alright, nothing is important, everything is the same, prostitution is just a physical labor. Then it shouldn't be decriminalized, like Aella and others want it to be, it should be legalized. All that noncoerced stuff should be registered as individual entrepreneurs, and be prosecuted for tax avoidance. Even more so, unemployed on welfare should be sent to brothels the moment a vacancy opens
What will we get here? Nothing. The real problem which was supposed to be solved there for the majority, problem of human trafficking, will not be solved. Even Aella with friends will lose as they won't be able to compete with brothels/callgirls and will get the same payment as McDonalds, eventually. And, suddenly, the only reason you wanted to do that for - more money for the same thing, - doesn't work anymore. So maybe it's not the problem, eh?
Legalization of prostitution is not the problem, that's a consequence of the problem. I read several stories about women getting education while sex working, getting a job and then still going back to prostitution because it's "easier". The easier the legalized work, the cheaper it is and even cleaning toilets requires smth more than consent and genitals.
> How exactly do you figure it's "the more likely reason"? What informed that? Do you have any foundation to make this claim?
> That's what happen in Germany, by the way. Prostitution counts as regular work and thus you get access to all kinds of benefits and access to the national retirement insurance, workplace injury insurance, etc.
Do they send unemployed to brothels yet?
>> So, if prostitution is just the same, we get serious inequality: women, by birth, have better opportunities than men.
>Uh... what?
You heard about the term "privilege", right? Last i checked, female prostitution was in a much higher demand and has always been.
The other side of a coin is that with current gender inequality, prostitution become an "equalizer" - women in difficult financial situation have no choice but prostitution or finding a wealthy husband if they want to raise their quality of life. So what's the point of legalizing this inequality? Women should be prostitutes because they can?
> Everything is rather complicated, I know. But it also gives you a lot of options and different way to get there.
I think, much more options would've been given if companies HAD to hire at least one apprentice if there happen to be one. Ofc, for a partial compensation from the government.
> The point is: you don't get paid going to school, and you don't get paid enough being an apprentice.
So this is the actual problem, not legalization of prostitution.
> I am sure that some people earn money from prostitution and other sex work to finance their time in school as opposed to taking out loans or work dead end side jobs with a lot worse pay-by-hour rate.
Be honest, it's not "some people", it's women. Women earn money from prostitution and other sex work to finance their time in school.
> The thing is, you'd get that slap under the current situation, where prostitution is not legal were you are and highly stigmatized.
At least a woman can take the easy way out and become a prostitute. A man has no such "luxury". Society does not pity weak men the way it pities weak women.
It's the apex of capitalist dehumanization to suggest that having few marketable services makes a person "weak" or that being having sex with people you don't love for money to eat food is a "luxury."
sadly the comments here reflect the overwhelming male capitalist bias of the HN community.
- A transactional view of life and relationships.
- Quick dismissal of concern for sex worker exploitation because "all jobs are exploitation", which simultaneously (a) minimizes the particularly bad nature of sexual exploitation, (b) speciously defines all work as exploitative, effectively neutering the word "exploitation" and (c) essentially saying exploitation is normal.
- There's almost a palpable giddiness in the comments overall. You can sense the immense confirmation bias. A post by a sex worker who portrays it in very businesslike and mostly positive ways, speaking positively about most of her customers, essentially providing validation for men who want to buy sex, who don't want to feel any guilt, or think about whether they are being exploitative / taking advantage of an imbalance of power.
- Few showing any awareness that Aella's is far from the typical experience, that most sex work is done in desperation, that our society doesn't give everyone even close to a level playing field.
- A harsh reaction against anyone being a party pooper by raising negative issues.
- Some comments showing veiled resentment that they have to pay a woman for sex, that women have it easier, that men are the unlucky ones, the oppressed ones.
- Compare the reaction here to posts about sexism in the tech industry.
> - A transactional view of life and relationships.
Is the irony not lost on you making such a statement on post about prostitution?
A "sex worker" is just a euphemism for a whore. You know what they say about lipsticks and pigs.
> that most sex work is done in desperation, that our society doesn't give everyone even close to a level playing field.
Cry me a river. That is such a lame copout. Not all of these prostitutes are desperate, and even the ones that are make a better living than some software engineers. You are telling me that a person can't find any job other than selling their own body??? What would you tell all the other women making minimum wage? Should they all become whores too?
My whole point was that desperate men don't even have the same luxury of such a fallback "job", so your statement is rather ironic.
> - Some comments showing veiled resentment that they have to pay a woman for sex, that women have it easier, that men are the unlucky ones, the oppressed ones.
Well, is it not true? In the sexual marketplace getting sex for women is effortless, and for men it takes all the effort in the world.
Seems a bit inconsistent to throw desperate addicts/single mothers in jail if they steal car stereos for meth money/baby food, but blame their johns if they turn to sex work instead. Which is it?
I did not make a comment on the issue of legality, and if you read my comment with an ounce of good faith reason and logic, you would never have put the words you just did into my mouth, and instead focus on what I actually said.
I was commenting on the casualness and callousness with which he uses "consenting adults" without regard to the power imbalance as well as the statistics with regard to sex workers and their "freedom".
Look at the attitude in the other replies:
> At least a woman can take the easy way out and become a prostitute. A man has no such "luxury". Society does not pity weak men the way it pities weak women.
> what you described applies to every single person in the world with a job.
> We all do stuff we'd rather not do for money.
And then there's the guy comparing strangers putting their penises into your mouth and vagina, always in fear of sexual assault, disease, degradation to "attending Scrum meetings and fixing CSS bugs."
Even you, with "but blame their johns", ignoring any notion of exploitation of the desperate and vulnerable.
My biggest problem here is that pretty much all working class labour has deep power imbalances and rampant systemic exploitation, but none of the discussion around it robs the labourer of quite as much agency as the discussion around prostitution. Very few people point to Amazon warehouse pickers and say the nature of the work is so obviously non-consensual it should be illegal, even if they're forced into it by impending homelessness or addiction.
It irritates me when people who are making the best of the hand they're dealt get talked down to like they haven't made a choice, and thrown in jail because they're trying to put food on the table. Yeah, vulnerable people are prostituting themselves because the alternative is worse, but how does making prostitution illegal fix the problem? It's a dumb knee-jerk reaction that makes everything worse - prostitution is driven underground, governments can't ask about working conditions or prosecute bad johns, and vulnerable people end up in jail.
> I was commenting on the casualness and callousness with which he uses "consenting adults" without regard to the power imbalance as well as the statistics with regard to sex workers and their "freedom".
It's interesting that this stricter form of consent doesn't extend to working shitty jobs at Walmart, McDonald's or cleaning toilets to pay the rent or buy your drugs. Why is work involving sex specifically the problem here? Is it something intrinsic to the work, or is it really the social stigma? And if it's the latter, isn't decriminalizing really the first step to solving that problem without removing women's agency and their ability to earn more money than working traditional menial job?
This is not a good take, what you described applies to every single person in the world with a job. The correct reason sex work is a complex subject is because it involves human trafficking.
If intimacy or attachment is a problem for you, then don't do that kind of sex work. I don't see how this is any different than other jobs. If I'm not physically strong, I'm not going to be a mover or a fire fighter.
> If a woman is poor, struggling to survive or trying to give a child a decent life in a society and economic system that is very sink or swim, do you consider it "consent" if she agrees to have sex with you so she can pay the rent, or have a decent meal, or buy the drugs she got hooked on dealing with depression and alienation, sold to her by a predatory drug dealer?
I give my boss consent to ask me to do stuff I'd rather not do. That's why they pay me. If I didn't get paid, I certainly wouldn't be doing things like attending Scrum meetings and fixing CSS bugs.
People tend to treat sex work like it's some sort of demeaning thing that no one should have to endure. If I had to choose between 1 hour of entertaining sexually entertaining someone for $1200 or 100 hours @ $12/hour of dealing with a shit boss in a demeaning dead-end job, I choose the former. And I choose neither if I don't need the money at all.
> People tend to treat sex work like it's some sort of demeaning thing that no one should have to endure.
I think this is exactly it. Many people can't imagine themselves having sex for money. Most people also can't imagine cutting into people as they do in surgery, but we don't ban surgery.
The purported "difference" is that surgery helps people. Sure, and helping a disabled person experience human intimacy is not helping them?
Another purported difference is that prostitution harms people where surgery does not. I think plastic surgery harms quite a few people, psychologically and physically.
The real "problem" here is people's hang ups about sex.
How the fsck is performing surgery analogous to being sexually penetrated by a stranger for money?
> Sure, and helping a disabled person experience human intimacy is not helping them?
First of all, it's all fake, there's no real intimacy there. Secondly, you make it sound like these whores take the job out of the goodness of their hearts. Having sex with cripples is the last thing on their mind... it's money first and foremost. Otherwise they'd just get a normal paying job like any other person who has self-dignity.
> The real "problem" here is people's hang ups about sex.
The real problem here is you misunderstanding human nature and attempting to normalize and rationalize something which clearly goes *against* human nature. Sex is not a commodity, selling sex for money is taboo and frowned upon in pretty much every society, even the so-called progressive ones that legalized prostitution. Since this stigma is universal to every society, there must be a psycho-biological reason for it, therefore prostitution is always going to be a niche, and never going to be "mainstreamed" ("My daughter is a prostitute!" said the proud mother).
> How the fsck is performing surgery analogous to being sexually penetrated by a stranger for money?
I just explained how. Read it again if you're not clear.
> First of all, it's all fake, there's no real intimacy there.
And you know this from first-hand experience I take it?
> Secondly, you make it sound like these whores take the job out of the goodness of their hearts. Having sex with cripples is the last thing on their mind... it's money first and foremost.
And I take it you work for your employer out of the goodness of your heart? No? So I guess the financial compensation must imply that you're not doing a good job. I mean, that is basically what you're saying.
> The real problem here is you misunderstanding human nature and attempting to normalize and rationalize something which clearly goes against human nature.
So what everyone agrees is "the oldest profession" is "against human nature". Haha, ok dude.
> Sex is not a commodity, selling sex for money is taboo and frowned upon in pretty much every society
No it's not. Some societies had accepted prostitution before they were colonized or conquered.
> Since this stigma is universal to every society, there must be a psycho-biological reason for it
Your pseudoscientific evolutionary justification is nonsense. The societies you're thinking of were colonized or conquered so there are obvious cultural reasons for shared taboos.
And even if your psycho-biological nonsense had even one iota of truth to it, it's completely irrelevant. By parity of reasoning we should therefore enshrine religious or supernatural theology in government policy because every society believed in supernatural supreme beings of some kind.
> therefore prostitution is always going to be a niche, and never going to be "mainstreamed" ("My daughter is a prostitute!" said the proud mother).
Ok, so it'll stay a niche. What's the problem? No one is going to be proud that their daughter works at McDonald's either. That's not a justification for why it should be illegal.
I personally don't feel that sex work is worse than any other work, unless we (society) make it so. I could be entirely wrong, but would a poor, struggling woman trying to do three non-sex jobs to feed that same child be in a particularly better position?
If sex work is just like any other job, then many, if not most Western welfare societies demand that an unemployed person takes any job in their skill-set.
So you end up demanding women go back to the prostitution - because there is an opening at the local brothel next to the truck stop.
This isn't theoretical - it has happened more than once in Germany.
I'm not entirely sure I grasp what you're trying to demonstrate.
1. Yes, most Western societies demand that an unemployed person takes any job in their skill-set.
2. Yes, there are certainly openings at the local brothel.
3. With any luck, there are also openings for other jobs at the local supermarket, or as teachers, or as nannies, or working the fields, or cleaning cars, or coding, or...
=> Yes, some women (and I imagine some men) are going to end up sex workers. Others are going to become supermarket employees, teachers, nannies...
I don't quite connect this to your affirmation that "its not normal work."
> I don't quite connect this to your affirmation that "its not normal work."
Really? You cannot get there?
Ok: If its normal work, then you - like what happened twice in Germany in my OP - are going to have to deal at some point with the case of a broken, depressed, uneducated, abused woman with dependency issues, likely ostracised from her family, etc, etc. who is desperate to never go back to her prostitution job.
Since - according to you - is no different to other normal work, you will have no reason to not insist that she takes up the opening at the local brothel in the not unlikely scenario that there are not actually any other positions available as a nannie/teacher/astronaut for such a candidate.
Just this one job. At the brothel. Who wants a prostitute.
You have a prostitute. One the dole. Your job is to get people back to work.
Now - if like any sane, compassionate human - you find yourself reluctant to insist on this - all the while whilst forcing every other unemployed bus driver, plumber, surgeon, pilot off the dole and back to work, then you too will have concluded that this one occupation is not normal.
So, if I understand correctly, your argument is that this specific job is a really, really bad match for some specific people (and more specifically for their physical and mental health), right?
If that's your argument, I'm pretty sure that I can find a few other jobs that are really, really bad matches for the physical and mental health of some people.
Now, I'm sure that I can find other arguments that go in your sense. If I had a daughter, I would probably not want her to become a sex worker, because I would be scared for her physical and mental health, in addition to the potential of ostracism. No idea how I would react about a son becoming a sex worker. But then, I would also not want my child to become a soldier or a cop for most of the same reasons, or a trucker or a miner, because I imagine that both jobs are also bad for physical and mental health, or any office job that would put them under the orders of an abusive boss, or a nurse in an underfunded hospital, or an Amazon warehouse worker, etc.
So, what I'm attempting to say is:
- we agree that it's very likely that low-end sex work is most likely a really bad place to be;
- we probably agree that there are lots of really bad jobs in the world;
- there are stigmata to sex work, including social pressure and the fact that low-end sex workers are basically not protected by the law;
- seen from a comfortable distance, and with the additional luxury of not being in a shitty job (anymore), my impression is that the biggest problem of sex work is not the sex but the stigmata and that these are pretty much artificial.
If you don't want your daughter to become a whore, then why are you wishing it upon others?
There is social stigma for prostitutes in pretty much every society. As the other poster's example shows, even in Germany where it is legal not many women want to perform an intimate sexual act on random strangers. Note that most prostitutes in Germany are foreign.
The empirical fact that there is universal social stigma implies that there is a psychobiological reason for it. A woman clearly understands that no high status man would want to marry a whore, which is why women use slut shaming against other women to make them less attractive as a mate to other males.
Unfortunately, legal sex work is often exploited as a safe haven for human trafficking. High end escorting is actually likely to be at the lower end of risk, but is ultimately too tiny of a niche for policymakers to care about preserving.
The reality is that despite being spun to a willing press as "human trafficking raids", these raids extremely rarely involve any human trafficking, and 99% of the woman being arrested, having their money confiscated, given criminal records, have their photos and names published online, lose their children etc. are in fact those same marginalized women who the state purports to want to help/save.
You misspelled 'illegal' - people being unable to go to the police is traffickers' preferred situation.
Legalisation, thereby making the same worker protections available as to everybody else, is precisely how to screw them over.
The messaging saying otherwise is largely from conservative and/or radfem organisations who're trying to get people to conflate prostitution and trafficking because they want to wipe out all prostitution, not just the coerced stuff.
There's a strong parallel to the war on drugs here - criminalisation largely benefits the criminals.
> There's a strong parallel to the war on drugs here - criminalisation largely benefits the criminals.
The obvious difference is that one can easily supply drugs in a legal market without engaging in other socially harmful behaviors. A closer analogy is trade in endangered animals. When you ban, e.g. the ivory trade and deprive it of a market, this has a direct effect on how many elephants get poached. Trying to regulate that trade more finely and preserve legal supply only makes things easier for those who engage in illegal activities, who can now misrepresent themselves as being part of a legal market.
Making it impossible for people who're being abused to go to the police without risking at least one of arrest, homelessness, or having their children taken away, is not a net win.
The idea that making it easier to contact the police about the genuinely coercive stuff would somehow make it easy for the people doing the coercion isn't logical.
You can see the process play out just the same with illegal immigrants - they're also massively more open to abuse from employers because they don't have full access to the criminal justice system.
So let's crack down harder on trafficking if the traffickers are doing illegal things. Your argument is like "online fraud is rampant" let's make purchasing items online illegal because we can't stop the fraud.
It would be nice if we could just regulate this industry to protect the people in it and start the work of reducing the stigma. Similar to abortion, people are going to do it whether or not it's legal. It will never have an "end". It's one of the oldest professions in human history. I do not understand why people fight this battle.
The number of hoops these people jump through only to be eventually assaulted and robbed anyway are ridiculous. It's a very dangerous job and it doesn't really have to be!
The ongoing stigma around sex is ridiculous... censoring female nippes (not necessarily even related to sex!), bans on "suggestiveness," etc... I've heard of people who run OnlyFans accounts (not escorts) essentially get run out of town if they live in conservative areas... and they really only get found out because the men in the area are patrons!
The tech industry supports these stigmas in huge ways by automating it (often unsuccessfully I might add! at one point I was suspended from Facebook for sharing a sculpture). Push back against this nonsense if you can.
There's a recent HN thread on truck driving, which is legal and regulated, and has relatively less stigma. Yet the industry has apparently also figured out every possible way to skirt the regulations and abuse drivers physically and financially if possible. Granted, that's not a statistical assessment, but it at least suggests to me that legalization and regulation are not enough by themselves to make an occupation safe and wholesome.
Of course it's not enough by itself, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. Right now a lot of sex workers are afraid to even report crimes committed against them... hard to get much worse than that. Even a slight improvement is improvement.
Very few people (as a fraction of the population, spare me the wall of text about the edge cases) are negatively effected by trucking.
If every dude who wanted to get laid could do so as easily as arranging an LTL shipment that would negatively effect a far larger subset of the population.
>If every dude who wanted to get laid could do so as easily as arranging an LTL shipment that would negatively effect a far larger subset of the population.
In what way? has the population been negatively affected in places where it's already legal?
It is also dangerous for a man as well. Some report being robbed or have their picture take upon arrival and blackmailed. It would be beneficial to both sides if people didn’t have to hide what they do.
If you're paying $1200 for "company", in cash, I reckon it would be unusual to also carry much more than a tip. My guess is the people who got robbed were at the low-cost end of the trade. Or maybe the men that got robbed were rapey anyway, and not a good bet for future business.
They don't do that to ~25%(!!!!) of customers. You can't continuously run an above the table business involving card processors if even 1/10th of those people do a charge-back.
That 22% is a lifetime figure, not a per-occurrence figure. I've had my credit card info stolen several times, yet the fraud rate per transaction is way below 1%.
with an average number of escort per client at 26, and at least some of them being repeat customers (but possibly some of them being robbed multiple times), it doesn't look that much... Well below 1% per act.
> It would be nice if we could just regulate this industry to protect the people in it.
Amen to that. As an ignorant outsider looking in, the first thing that comes to mind is the possible huge safety benefits gained by collective bargaining. Even if it's not certified and recognized by the NLRB, there's gotta be something.
Decriminalization, that's mostly what sex workers want. I'm pretty wary of regulation, which often is done in misguided ways by people out of touch with sex workers' actual needs.
How do you feel about the approach being taken in Victoria, Australia?
It's been legal in licensed settings for quite a while, but they're now changing to make it legal in more situations in response to requests from solo sex workers. I'm rather happy with the situation (and new improvements) as a client and my understanding is that workers are happy about it.
Decriminalization is implied. Necessary but not sufficient. That most certainly should (have) happen(ed by now). By regulation, I'm thinking the worker safety axis, not nec. the consumer protection one; agreed, if existent, it should be steered by those with understanding of actual needs, and not the peanut gallery.
Legalizing for protection of those involved is one thing, but it is completely orthogonal to 'reducing the stigma'. Frankly this is where these movements lose people, including the abortion movement.
Youre downvoted but have a good point. I agree its a victimless crime and so the govt has no business regulating it, but pushing for destigmitization is a different kind of social change. Why is that important?
I'd say it's because your primary base of support is going to come from people who are tired of the thing being stigmatized. Of course they're going to want to fight against that - it's only natural.
I know a lot of guys who dont wake up every day and say they want to sell their bodys for hard labor to the highest bidder, but it's decent work. Similar to how women can contract incurable, potentially-lethal venereal diseases as prostitutes, jobs like construction can really mess up a man's body. Doesn't mean we should ban them.
Many jobs are somewhat like that, but it's a matter of degree. Compare the market price of the job to the price that would lead people to want to take the job.
A lot of people would be willing to become a janitor at 3 times the market wages for janitors. A lot of people who are physically able to do construction work would take the job at 3 times the market rate for construction work. Not a lot of people would be willing to become a prostitute at 3 times the market rate for prostitutes.
This means that prostitution is much farther on the scale of "forced into by circumstances" than janitors or construction workers.
>Not a lot of people would be willing to become a prostitute at 3 times the market rate for prostitutes.
Citation please. I find it very hard to believe that prostitution is immune to the same price based supply and demand forces that every other labor pool is.
The problem is that people who become prostitutes are often people who have no other choice. So you'll get a bifurcated distribution: people who will only take the job at some incredibly high multiple (because prostitution is really awful compared to other choices) and people who will take the job at any price because the janitors aren't hiring and they need to eat. The point of the comparison is to capture this problem.
True. Ultimately, the problem which requires a solution is not decriminalization of the prostitution but the origin of why people get into the situation where prostitution starts looking as a way out. But, since no one cares, decriminalization is a good thing to do - excluding people from the society for getting into the situation, which is a product of this society, is unfair
Yet, many men wake up with the desire to build things. That is not an atypical desire. Many men wake up with a desire to build things for money. Many women do as well.
Few people wake up wanting to sell their procreative parts to the highest bidder.
If you're okay with one of these things but not the other, then you are applying a double standard based on a moralisation of sex. Sex as labour is no different than any labour, and there is no criticism of sex work that is whole an complete that does not also criticise the very system you're defending.
If that is true, then a thought experiment would be: should refusing to enter prostitution be a grounds for losing jobseekers' welfare, eg. jobseekers allowance [1]?
It's comparable to working in a butcher that specialises in pork. Clearly, the job would be unsuitable for a Muslim or vegan jobseeker. That's why the government website specifies suitable jobs and has an exception for a good reason not to do the job.
I agree with the general principle that not all labour is the same, but I don't think prostitution is in a class of its own. If you paid me enough I'd probably do it for a week and then retire.
> If you paid me enough I'd probably do it for a week and then retire.
Maybe this means that you don't really like your job? If you had access to the same goods as everyone else around you, more or less, and liked what you are doing, then doing it for a week stops making sense, doesn't it?
For me it would've been ok to work 6/5(better 6/4) for the rest of my life if it actually was something meaningful for the society, and if I had an opportunity to occasionally switch to smth different, and if i got a stable life for it. Even if i didn't like the job with all my heart
Sex is very different. Last I checked, no matter how much construction work you do, you will never construct another person, even by accident.
Sex is not just another activity. Due to its effects of potentially creating a new human being, it is a category unto itself and deserves special treatment.
For example, would you sell your pancreas? Why not? Is it because a vital organ is not in the same class of goods as say a lightbulb?
The same is true of selling sex, which is not just some social interaction, but a social interaction that can literally make a new person
Your kind of equivocation is morally lazy and conveniently abiological.
> For example, would you sell your pancreas? Why not? Is it because a vital organ is not in the same class of goods as say a lightbulb? [...] Your kind of equivocation is morally lazy and conveniently abiological.
Speaking of lazy, that's a pretty ridiculous comparison. Depriving yourself of a vital organ is not the same as renting out your genitals for a limited time.
"Making a new person" is also a complete red herring. You can hire a surrogate to carry a baby to term, which is also paying to use someone else's genitals to actually make a new person. The only meaningful difference is the absence of "sex", so I think it's clear what you really have a problem with.
> You can hire a surrogate to carry a baby to term
In the vast majority of first world countries this is illegal for precisely the reasons I described. Only extremely poor countries or barbaric jurisdictions, such as California, allow paid surrogacy.
> not the same as renting out your genitals for a limited time.
Given the genitals ability to produce life that can last many years beyond yourself, you're absolutely right. Renting out your genitals is much worse.
> In the vast majority of first world countries this is illegal for precisely the reasons I described.
No it's not. The potential to make humans is not equal to the intentional act to create humans, just like the potential to commit murder is not the same as the intentional act to commit murder.
> Only extremely poor countries or barbaric jurisdictions, such as California, allow paid surrogacy.
You definitely need to update your list, because more states are surrogate friendly than aren't.
Because the action under consideration is of a wholly different class than the others you mention.
For example, we regulate ivf, don't we? Why? Because the action undertaken has the ability to create new life.
The same is true of prostitution. The action undertaken is of a wholly different nature. Namely it can create people, which is different than any other labor.
Tolerating homosexual prostitution is actually more akin to your other analogies in that the action undertaken is not special. Although anal intercourse in general ought to be discouraged due to its deleterious health effects.
> For example, we regulate ivf, don't we? Why? Because the action undertaken has the ability to create new life. The same is true of prostitution.
No, we don't regulate it because it can create new life, we regulate it because it falls under healthcare for which doctors have a certain duty of care, and if IVF is done poorly it can cause all sorts of deleterious health effects for the mother and the implanted embryo. These considerations do not apply to prostitution since we have contraception and abortion.
Nonsense, we directly regulate even that which is not about health care. For example, most countries limit the amount of children a man can sire via sperm donation.
> These considerations do not apply to prostitution since we have contraception and abortion.
Whose burden falls solely on the women, and for which large portions of the population would object to the use of abortion as birth control. Even many pro-abortion people object to abortion's use as birth control, because they view abortion as justified murder, but murder nevertheless.
No, abortion is not murder because fetuses do not have personhood under the law. It's clear you don't really understand the legal precedents you're pontificating on so I don't really see this going anywhere.
It's much harder to fight the stigma around anything that's illegal because it instantly gets equated with crime. It's hard to talk about an experience that will get you branded a criminal...
Decriminalization of marijuana in many places is getting people talking about it more openly, for example. It's not everything but it's a start.
>It's much harder to fight the stigma around anything that's illegal because it instantly gets equated with crime.
And because a large subset of the population (which tend to be over-represented on the white collar parts of the internet who generally have the luxury of always being able to afford cost of compliance in their day to day lives) happily lets the state dictate their morals by mentally bucketing illegal things as immoral by default.
Drug gangs destroying South America, tens of thousands dying due to Fentanyl-laced pills, lost tax revenue, huge taxpayer expense, petty crime used to fund overpriced drugs, are all signficiantly worse things than what you are afraid of. It's a laugh to see all these right-leaning people who pretend to be libertarians (not sure if that's you, but in general) but are actually in favor of a large state and authoritarian government intervention on topics such as drugs.
I'm not a libertarian and I'm not a small government person.
I believe inimited government, not small government.
If you need a giant government to enforce law then you need a big government.
For example, if you have a government of say 100 people, and they decided to hire 10 people and start a fast food restaurant I would be against this new government of 110 people. On the other hand, if the same government needed to hire 5000 people to combat drugs, I'd support that.
Why? Because limited government means government should only do a limited number of things. Opening a fast food restaurant is not the proper place of a government. Enforcing drug law is. Government can be as large as necessary to accomplish that.
Ok, you are not a hypocrite, but I still think it's objectively bad policy from a cost-benefit standpoint, and it's bad from every political perspective. Four arguments that might move a right-leaning person:
- The drug war is indirectly causing more illegal immigration into the US because it's destabilizing South America.
- The drug war is shifting large profits away from US pharma and into foreign narco gangs, which is bad for GDP growth and therefore the strength of the nation.
- The drug war means taxation needs to be higher because it's expensive.
- The drug war creates more street crime, which ranks highly in what right-leaning people care about.
So I just don't understand why right-leaning people (not just libertarians) are so actively voting against almost all of their stated interests. Add to this a number of other reasons (how bad it is for the black community, how poor whites are being literally killed by fentanyl, how it pushes people into more dangerous and cheaper drugs such as ice and crack, how hypocritical it is for alcohol and cigarettes to be legal, how morally questionable it is to punish a victimless crime), and the case is clear cut to me.
> Ok, you are not a hypocrite, but I still think it's objectively bad policy from a cost-benefit standpoint, and it's bad from every political perspective. Four arguments that might move a right-leaning person:
I'm not a libertarian, but libertarians -- unless they're of the high school variety -- are not carte blanche small government. They are certainly limited government. Perhaps you should begin by not arguing against high-school-level strawmen.
> The drug war is indirectly causing more illegal immigration into the US because it's destabilizing South America.
Almost certainly, but what happens in South America is not america's problem. America can build a wall and deport the illegal aliens back, as any sovereign country would.
> The drug war is shifting large profits away from US pharma and into foreign narco gangs, which is bad for GDP growth and therefore the strength of the nation.
Yes, unfortunately, we do not imprison enough whites for their drug habits, and instead jail mostly non-whites. The solution is to put more white drug users in jail for a very long time or institute pretty harsh rehabilitation programs (i.e., not released until you're sober for X amount of time, and then close follow-up monitoring).
> The drug war means taxation needs to be higher because it's expensive.
That's fine. I'm not against taxation, as long as the taxes are being spent on worthwhile things that are the purview of government. For example, if you told me taxes had to be raised 1% for 'diversity training' I'd say no, because diversity training is not the purview of government. If you told me taxes had to be raised 20% due to an increase in crime and the need to imprison and incarcerate more criminals, that would be okay. WE all have to share society's burdens, I just don't want to share the burden of things I don't want.
> The drug war creates more street crime, which ranks highly in what right-leaning people care about.
Indeed. So we should institute harsher criminal sentencing.
> So I just don't understand why right-leaning people (not just libertarians) are so actively voting against almost all of their stated interests.
Dude... you live in a bubble. There is no group of 'right-leaning' people who 'state' their interests in some centralized publication.
The only people who 'state' right-leaning people's interests are left-wing publications trying to create strawmen. Perhaps listen to others instead of imagining their interests?
> how bad it is for the black community,
The black community was the initial force behind the drug war
> how poor whites are being literally killed by fentanyl
More doctors and pharmacists should frankly be in jail.
> how it pushes people into more dangerous and cheaper drugs such as ice and crack
Great, those dealers should be imprisoned too. We have too few prisons in this country, given the level of crime and drugs.
> how hypocritical it is for alcohol and cigarettes to be legal
Alcohol and cigarettes have a long cultural history. They are luxuries tolerated for the culture. Not something innate.
> how morally questionable it is to punish a victimless crime
The victim is the person doing the drugs. It is well within the purview of government to punish people for victimizing themselves, to discourage the behavior. For example, many countries used to criminalize attempted suicide. I'm not going to turn this into an argument on that... but that is well within the government's purview.
Your argument is that the cost and side effects don't matter, the war on drugs must be won no matter what. You hand wave away the negative consequences (illegal immigration can be magically dealt with with better enforcement!). If that's your perspective then I can't change your mind because it's coming from a place of ideology.
"The only people who 'state' right-leaning people's interests are left-wing publications trying to create strawmen. Perhaps listen to others instead of imagining their interests?"
What? Illegal immigration, taxes, crime and the economy are among the top issues for conservatives, and your drug war is making all of those things worse. If you think these aren't concerns for conservatives you are just wrong. Polling of conservatives establishes this clearly as does the rhetoric of leading conservatives. The economy, crime and illegal immigration were all big parts of Trump's platform.
I vote conservative for the most part. I'm just not one of those authoritarian dick head conservatives that try to control other people's lives over victimless crimes. And no, the person who smokes pot isn't a victim. Tobacco and alcohol are worse for the body than the occasional vape, so I completely reject your premise.
Assassination.
Burglary.
Similar to abortion, people are going to do it whether or not it's legal. It will never have an "end". It's one of the oldest professions in human history.
Some might argue that assassination and burglary have a victim where prostitution does not.
There are arguments against prostitution as a victimless crime, but it is not straightforward in any argument to demonstrate victim and perpetrator like it is with assassination, burglary, assault, etc.
You're seriously out here comparing consensual sex between two consenting adults to murder for hire? You can at least try to make a point in good faith first.
I never voiced my attitude towards legalization of prostitution. I addressed very specific weak argument.
Sorry, if you found my comment rude, i assure you that this was not my goal.
You used abortion there. I don't think we could get a consent from fetus, law just assumes that female parent have a power over it's life until some development point.
People consensually participate at gambling, dueling, pyramid schemes, become criplled drugs and alcohol addicts, selling themselves and they family to slavery, do suicide.
Nor consent, nor something being an old and persistent part of the human culture are good reasoning.
I said sex work is an old profession to exemplify why banning it doesn't work. I certainly didn't present the age of the profession as the sole reason for legalizing it.
I don't think you consider assassination and prostitution equivilant crimes, yet you made the comparison. Why? What's the point of taking something out of context to invalidate it?
If you have reasons for opposing the legalization of sex work, they're completely lost on me. Maybe start there instead of pedantry.
> Once you start seeing clients, expect to get used as a reference and to start getting emails from other providers asking about clients you’ve seen. It’s considered extremely good form to respond; this is a collective safety system we all use to help each other, you rely on their information and they rely on yours.
I wonder if the police could exploit this practice to make arrests. Arrest an escort, get access to their email as evidence, then start going after the people who made reference requests. I suppose the email address could even be used to fake a reference for a sting, but I doubt that would be legal in the US. Probably the only reason this system works is the police don't care enough to exploit it.
> I’ve been sexually assaulted on the job (which was sort of my mistake; this was the one guy who I thought I’d screened but actually hadn’t, and if I’d screened him I would have not met him)
No it wasn't your mistake. It hurts me to see that people who have been through trauma blame themselves for it.
I appreciate the care here! I do think he very clearly should not have assaulted me, and I also think I made a mistake by not screening him. Both are true! I have no sense of guilt or self-blame around this, I mostly have "Oh, I failed to do a thing that would have protected me, I'll make sure to do that next time, good to know."
There is a difference between exposing yourself to too much risk and being responsible for what happens to you. She made a mistake and blames herself for that. It was her mistake. She doesn't blame herself for the assault itself just for putting herself in a dangerous situation. I mean, if you don't realize it's your fault to mess up the screening process you will never correct it. It's healthy to realize your mistake.
Kinda baffling, when she gets assaulted she never even let the guy know he was doing something wrong, and later in the article she admits to raping a guy who had clearly stated he didn't want to have sex with her, while conspiring with her friend about it. And she barely even registers she did something wrong. It was "awkward".
Once in a while, I come across something like this and wonder, what is it like to be that rich to casually drop 1,200 an hour, for anything, let alone on escorts.
I'm not sure that's true. There are wealthy, powerful men who can pay any hourly rate for sex and who are practically above the law in many parts of the world. It would be a mistake to assume that some of them wouldn't assault an escort in the not inaccurate belief that they can do whatever they want with impunity.
It is backed up by the author's analytics, though. Perhaps there are valid criticisms about her sampling methodology and the sample size at the very high end, but it's a good start.
Without looking at the numbers at all I'm pretty sure that number can be ignored almost completely. It's all but guaranteed to be vastly underreported, but fortunately none of the common STDs are deadly. HIV and hepatitis are both rare in Western countries and syphilis can be cured with antibiotics.
9% of the workers reported never using a condom and a further percentage only use them sometimes. I suspect those are the majority of the 17% with an std.
Actually none of the zero-condom users reported getting a STD. My theory is that zero-condom users tend to be much more exclusive and to have fewer clients, or to do this closer to part-time?
I've always been mildly curious, my first thoughts were "Less than I thought!".
Hear me out (criticism of my thinking on this is very welcome):
In LA's Ktown, a Domi (a job I had no idea existed just a few years ago... google if curious) charges a base rate of $100/hr, plus tips. For the client, there is no guarantee of nudity or any physical contact, though it's of course up to each individual what they're willing to do (and for how much).
From the perspective of the client, $100/hr buys you in-person company in a public setting with someone young, conventionally attractive, dressed skimpily. The person will (pretend to) politely listen to you as you talk, (pretend to) smile, (pretend to) laugh at your jokes, pour drinks for you, (pretend to) agree with your opinions, and, if they choose to, drink with you.
The market supports that price ($100/hr!) for work that does not require ANY sex as requisite. I imagined "entry level" sex work would be priced ~10x (min 7x) over work done (skimpily) clothed and in public, and that, like many other goods and services, "luxury" would have a multiplier over "entry level brand" between 5x and the stratosphere. (I guess with cars it's ~3x.)
These assumptions yield a price of $5k/hr for "luxury brand sex work", ~4x the empirical data. If we assume that "luxury" has a multiplier of just 3x (but I bet it's more!), then the ratio of the market price of sex work over somewhat similar (companionship, paid to be pretty and objectified) work done clothed and in a public venue, in the same city,... can be at most 4x.
I have no experience with this industry, I don't know what Domi is. I was simply looking at the numbers from my very limited (zero) understanding of the economics of sex work and economics in general. $1,200 is two months of my food budget, when I eat well, lol.
Somebody reading this comment (probably making minimum wage) might be thinking 20$ (1200/60) per day food budget is a luxury.
Anyway, all I was wondering is - a super tiny percentage of the population can afford to spend 1200 an hour, on anything. Must be nice to be that rich, lol.
In the past 20 years, I've been nearly homeless, working 2 minimum wage retail jobs 60/h week and cursing the lack of time or energy to improve my situation, and, at another extrema, regularly charged about $1,200/day for my time.
Right now I'm MUCH closer to the former than the later. I can tell you the latter is more fun! ;) But, even then, I'd spend $100/h for a luxury like fine dining, and spending $1000/h for a luxury would have seemed absurd. I imagine if, one made 10x the money, then spending $1000/h for a luxury might make sense?
I doubt it is more than a fetish or urban myth. If the market would be there, lots of people would be doing this. But there is no essential market for this.
Well many people spend $12,000 a year on a hobby like travel, skiing, whatever. One escort a month is similar. Very few consume it hourly at the same volume as say Netflix.
It strikes me somewhat oddly that one might pay so much for something that literally half the people on this planet is equipped to provide
You're paying for looks, ease, simplicity, no strings, and so on... I get it. But idunno, that is a lot of money for one nut.
Also suprised the San Diego price is so high, when there is a red light district literally on the border in Tijuana, and those girls charge $60-$100/hr US to gringos (and less to spanish-speakers, locals, and people who pay in pesos)
This is the high-end price. It's not for every man and definitively not for every woman. While some intelligence is required to charge these high prices, some genetics lottery luck is also required.
> It strikes me somewhat oddly that one might pay so much for something that literally half the people on this planet is equipped to provide
High-end is basically differentiating yourself from average.
> You're paying for looks, ease, simplicity, no strings, and so on... I get it. But idunno, that is a lot of money for one nut.
It's cheap if you are rich and worried about lawsuits, law enforcement, blackmailing, your reputation, etc... Suddenly, $1200/h is quite cheap.
> It strikes me somewhat oddly that one might pay so much
$1200 an hour, with a minimum 1.5 hours, so $1800. In addition to a 20-minute roll in the hay, you get an attractive, intelligent person for company, who is skillful at flattering men.
So these "half the people on the planet": if they're not prostitutes, then you will have to date them. You are not going to cop if you take your date out to KFC. Even taking them to a posh restaurant won't guarantee you'll get your end away.
So let's say you manage to get a date 6 nights a week, and you shell-out for a meal and a show ($350 each?). Let's say half of them are people that interest you. Let's say half of those would consider bonking someone on the first date.
So you're out-of-pocket $2100, you've spent three evenings chatting to someone that didn't interest you, and two of the others want more meals and shows (but how many?)
I think my guesses are wild overestimates. I have no idea how one might ever get 6 dates a week. Most women won't bonk you on the first date. Far less than 50% of women are "interesting" (FSVO interesting).
If your time is scarce and valuable, your standards are high, and you have enough money to e.g. take holidays in nice places, then spending a couple of grand on a classy girl for the evening, with a guaranteed payoff, doesn't look insane.
This sounds completely off the mark for anyone that is moderately attractive, outgoing whilst possessing intelligence and social skills (I know, such a high bar to clear amongst SV types). The fact is, if one is above average in these areas, sex with attractive females doesn't cost one anything besides the time one puts in for the experience itself.
Throwing money at escorts is such a loser move (and the experience so far away from sex with a woman that truly desires you) that only someone who's never experienced the latter would seriously argue for paying 1200$ to have 20 minute sex with "an attractive, intelligent person for company, who is skillful at flattering men."
> The fact is, if one is above average in these areas
I'm 65. When I was 18, I was very scruffy, probably smelled bad, and had no money and no car. Women didn't exactly jump at me. I didn't try very hard to persuade them to. And there were no dating apps, and no websites.
I've never been into the "fuckem-and-chuckem" school of romance - I had a few one-nighters with pretty girls. If I was up for paying an escort, I'd pay for a nice one.
> the experience so far away from sex with a woman that truly desires you
So you've had the "escort experience"? Odd, then, that you'd say "throwing money at escorts is such a loser move". Maybe you chose badly?
I don’t need to have the escort experience to know it sucks. Not only have I had close friends that did (there was a group at Google that started out as typical virgin nerds and dabbled in high class escorts) but reading those escort testimonials should make it more than clear that the forced for-money experience is far inferior to actual sexual chemistry.
> This sounds completely off the mark for anyone that is moderately attractive, outgoing whilst possessing intelligence and social skills (I know, such a high bar to clear amongst SV types). The fact is, if one is above average in these areas, sex with attractive females doesn't cost one anything besides the time one puts in for the experience itself.
Sounds on the mark to me. I'm extroverted AF, intelligent, can make just about anyone laugh, and can form deep bonds and have deep conversations with people I literally run into off the street. Trying to date in SFO though? Purgatory. I'm not tall - I'm 5'10". I'm not muscular but also not fat - I'm 140lb. I'm a niche good - I don't have the universal appeal of Chris Hemsworth. Therefore, real life is where I'd sell best because I do well in conversation and - unfortunately - that takes so much time. Sooooo much time. The biggest issue is just getting in front of a beautiful woman. Once I'm in front - I can shoot myself in the foot and be okay with it. But, the fact that I can't even get in front of one is the hugest barrier to my lack of dating horror stories to tell friends. It's depressing.
It's the land of 49ers and an escort like Aella sounds appealing to me. I don't know if I'd ever do it for two reasons though. Firstly, I'm a bit too dedicated to a woman's pleasure and I'd worry an escort would be too much in their head to actually enjoy themselves fully. I already have to deal with that with women as it is. I cannot imagine how much in your own head you are as an escort. There was an aspect she touched on in her article that I was thinking myself as I was reading - which is that at least now she gets paid to have mediocre sex. I'm not really into mediocre sex. She did enjoy some but I wonder what it takes for an escort to enjoy it. I've only engaged in sexual acts with women who were obviously very into me (if only for the moment due to some hormones but at least they were into me for that night or two!). I don't doubt her abilities to fake it well but I also think many men are blind, apathetic, or as self-absorbed as many women I've encountered... and I'm not. So I don't think the sex would be good for either of us unless she was into me. Thus, would it be a good experience even if it was free? Probably not. If she was into me then why are we not just dating instead of some paid transaction? I mean if we're dating then she should really be trying to convince me to buy the $3m house like my last partner wanted... $2k transactions are cheap in comparison!
Secondly, the money aspect is very real to me. I might have a couple million in the bank and a 1%er income but the value proposition just is hard for me to reckon with. I think, "$2000+ for a nice night out with a pretty lady who will only see me as long as I keep paying $2k+ for every interaction... or my soft and delicate keyboard warrior hand for the low low price of self-loathing and depression?" For someone who is a comedian in his social circle - it's quite obvious which I'm going for. Self-hatred is just too good to pass up.
Also - 20 minutes? You're with a total babe and you're gonna just spend 20 minutes? What the f. Whenever that kind of opportunity presents itself to me - you have to wheel us both out after.
Sex is a market, and like any market, it has theories that can explain it.
For example: in most places, most of the time, prostitutes charge the same "rate" as wives do, because they're suppliers in competition, and the market sets the price.
Oh, you think your wife doesn't "charge" you for sex? How quaint and romantic! Of course she does. You're paying more rent. You're paying for more food. You're paying with expensive gifts, trips, and most importantly, you're paying to raise one or more kids. In many countries it's literally a crime for men not to pay child support.
If you step outside of your world for a second and look at it from the outside like an anthropologist might, you'll note that $1200/hour is about right for the "market price" in an nicer part of the world for affluent men. Most men have sex once or twice a week with their spouse, and more than half of their disposable income goes towards their partner and their kids.
> Oh, you think your wife doesn't "charge" you for sex? How quaint and romantic! Of course she does. You're paying more rent. You're paying for more food. You're paying with expensive gifts, trips, and most importantly, you're paying to raise one or more kids.
What a strange perspective. In the US at least, having a wife makes you richer, as most women work, and you still live in a one bedroom, so your total income is significantly higher but your costs are only marginally higher. Getting married to another member of the workforce is a great way to build wealth.
You can buy a phone with the same spec as an iPhone for an eighth of the price. You can buy a car that goes from A-B for a fraction of the price of your Porsche. Those selvedge RRL jeans you like for 269 - Uniqlo do a version for 35. Is that Michelin star really better than Domino's? That is a lot to spend on just a phone, something to get you from A-B, something to cover your legs, something to fill you up, etc etc.
She sort of addresses it in the sentence that ends: "...and might be more likely to attract higher power men who are looking to “unlock” something they feel few other people have seen – your nudity."
I guess it's like anything. Things with a higher price feel more exclusive and we desire the things we can't have. If you can afford it, why would you skimp? If it's less affordable - maybe you'd prefer it to feel like an experience (at least in your own head) rather than 'one nut'?!
No steak is worth $200. But several people up-thread have made the point that $1200 per hour isn't that much, if you consider the alternatives (e.g. getting married - and if you can afford $1200 for a night out, then the divorce is probably going to be very, very expensive).
> Once in a while, I come across something like this and wonder, what is it like to be that rich to casually drop 1,200 an hour, for anything, let alone on escorts.
Median income is $100,000/yr. My impression (from HN) is this isn't abnormal for non-entry-level tech workers in the US.
Keep in mind my rate was 1200, but $100k was the median reported income for all clients who responded to my survey. I suspect the median income for clients who saw me would be much higher!
Compliments on a well communicated, insightful, and data driven look into a opaque industry that I've been curious about for a while!
I'm curious what you think about the relative price comparison to hostess work in LA outlined above. Either you're charging too little, or.. there's some.. interesting implied conclusions about the low relative cost (from the worker's perspective) for sex work! Or there's not enough information liquidity in the market? Or...
I Am Not An Economist, but... I can't shake the feeling there's a mispricing somewhere. Possibly a juicy topic for a paper, blog post, or Planet Money episode.
Also, that gonewild post is genius. Thanks for the laughs.
Edit: I didn't realize this person was pointing out a typo.
Disagree. High end work of all sorts isn't the sort of thing you punch in and out of. Both have a high opportunity cost, in that in both cases you'll find it hard to work a similarly compensated second job. Also remember this is only "billable hours".
Edit: I just realized you've completely missed my point. I was replying to a comment the clients (i.e. not the sex workers) are crazy rich. I was presenting an argument for why they aren't.
This is indeed cheap. The alternative is marriage that's gonna last 5 years and cost 1 million. That's 4k or 4 hours (discount for large order) per week - more than enough for most men who are able to marry such women. Sorry for my cynical view.
To charge high prices you have to be attractive. Old, overweight prostitutes can’t charge as much as models.
As someone who used services in the past, I don’t understand why anyone would spend any money at all on those… but they do find clients. Maybe it’s because if I lower my standards I can just easily find someone “for free” instead.
One must be really a hopeless ugly German to pay a woman from EE for sex. They hope for a relationship anchoring them in the country and need a guide through the ruthless rules and bureaucracy, you receive sex free of charge. Bulgaria, Romania, Moldavia, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine - you pick the flavour. Historical justice... not.
> One must be really a hopeless ugly German to pay a woman from EE for sex.
Not really, if you are interested in obtaining paid sex you don't have much choice. Most of the brothels are staffed by EE sex workers, been that way for well over a decade. German sex workers are rare in brothels, they work mostly escort and camgirl stuff.
The problem at its core is extreme poverty in EE - not many job opportunities that pay decent wages, so many people from there come to the nearest wealthy country aka Germany. Men go on the construction/agriculture gig job scene, women to prostitution... it doesn't pay much and the conditions both of work and living are extremely bad (just google "Arbeiterstrich München" if you want newspaper reports on the construction gig workers), but even this is better than life in their origin countries. As a result, German workers simply can't afford to work in this environment.
Many EE countries are already in EU, their citizens do not need to go through ruthless rules and bureaucracy to live in Germany, they just need to find any work there.
This is from a group of sex workers who appear to be screening their clientele. I wonder how high the number would be among sex workers who don't have the same amount of financial safety net that someone who can pick and chose their clients has.
I also wonder how those assaults could be brought down, if that is even possible in the first place. I always hear how sex work just needs to be regulated and everything would be fine, but how does one prosecute something that happens in a private setting, behind closed doors?
It should be decriminalized, not regulated. I would have liked to have been able to go to the police about the client who assaulted me, but unfortunately this didn't cross my mind as an option.
That's the Nordic model which has been a collosal failure. The workers get harassed by both police and clients alike, they are no better off. Actual legitimacy would allow workers to better organize and protect themselves, and would also better mitigate human trafficking by leveraging regulation. Germany is working on improving its laws to this end.
Yes, you're right. I had decriminalization in mind, but maybe chose the incorrect word.
And to elaborate on the prosecution part, in the wake of #MeToo, a lot of people came out with their stories, but not many of them pursued a legal route. I got the feeling that proving many of those allegations would be difficult in a legal system and whatever cases that did go through the legal system had a preponderance of evidence - along with immense social pressure - backing them up (think Bill Cosby/Harvery Weinstein). This is what made me wonder how much of a deterrent decriminalization/regulation would be on sexual assaults. Do we have to use public shaming, like in #MeToo, as a deterrent mechanism?
There are lots of bad things that arguably shouldn't be illegal but suppressed. Smoking, abortion, prostitution, drugs, etc. I think for society to fully embrace decriminalization there needs to be a diversion mechanism. Cigarettes have taxes and programs to quit. What would the prostitution equivalent be?
> I think for society to fully embrace decriminalization there needs to be a diversion mechanism.
Yes, let's make men who want to pay for sex watch an hour-long video extolling the virtues of "real" relationships.
The reality is that there are a lot of men who enter into "normal" relationships with women in large part because it gives them easier access to sex. Not all of them are happy. Lots of them overextend themselves financially, and generally do things they wouldn't otherwise do, to keep their girlfriends satisfied.
These are less direct exchanges, but they are exchanges nonetheless.
I'm living in East Asia, which has made me think more about the exchanges that take place in relationships between men and women. Here, it's common to see men with expressionless looks on their faces lugging their girlfriends' handbags, spending 20 minutes helping them take cutesy photos, pushing strollers carrying not children but tiny, professionally-groomed pups, etc.
As a warm-blooded man, you'd have a hard time convincing me that access to sex isn't a big reason these men are putting up with this stuff. Why do men who pay for sex need a diversion mechanism but the men who totally lose themselves in a relationship don't?
Arguably both do. I am well aware that both prostitution and 'real' relationships both exist on the same continuum of exchange. What I would like to see are long term studies on the outcomes in prostitution and non prostitution communities.
And then what? You're going to tell consenting adults what they're allowed to do based on some subjective analysis of these?
What happens if the men who pay directly for sex report shorter relationships and have lifespans 6 months shorter than men who don't, but they tell you they're happier? Or what happens if you discover that men who pay for sex while in relationships report longer relationships?
Why are you already bringing up disincentives? Your comments hint that you've already decided there is something inherently wrong with paying directly for sex. You're totally dismissing the possibility that research might very well find that prostitution is a net positive for individuals, and that most of the associated negatives are caused by its criminalization.
You're right, research could show that it's an unmitigated benefit and I would have to reevaluate my position. I cannot however live in the world of hypotheticals. My present understanding is based on existing information available.
Philosophically I am wary of the coercive power of money in relationships. The economy is misunderstood enough, I can't imagine the situation is better when it comes to intimacy markets. Can I coin the phrase Psychological economics?
I see parasocial relationships as something like a new virus that the human psyche has no immunity towards. People naturally think in emotional rather than transactional terms.
It's not hypothetical that prostitution is often called the world's oldest profession for a reason. Power dynamics that can seem unfair and might be abused exist in human relationships, like it or not, and have since time immemorial. Don't even look at the animal kingdom. It's not prettier.
Also, the relationship between an escort and a client is absolutely not a "parasocial relationship." You're abusing that term. Escorts and their clients have real relationships, even if you have a problem with the fact that they're based on transactional intimacy.
Its not clear that those a different sets of people. Just because they screen their clients now, doesn't mean that they always have. Unfortunately, getting personally assaulted might be the reason they now screen their clients so well.
> I also wonder how those assaults could be brought down, if that is even possible in the first place.
I doubt we would ever get it down to the background rate, but having a high base rate means there is a lot of room for improvement.
Just legalizing it would probably help. Having an above ground would likely improve the quality the background check network, and would increase the accessibility of information on how to be a sex worker with relative safety.
Beyond that, the potential to have a good relationship with police would probably be a big help. I doubt it would see much actual use (who wants to risk a reputation of getting their clients arrested), however at least some people would be more careful if they thought there was a chance that the sex worker could report them.
There is also the option of proper brothels, with panic buttons and bouncers listening in for screams.
Before determining how you should police sex work or customers thereof, you might want to contextualize it with an understanding of both reports and estimates of unreported sexual assaults of women in the general population.
It's very interesting to me that escorts are able to charge that much (possible to make a median wage in the area in a few hours of work) and still have as much space for demands (detailed screenings, choosing clients etc.). It seems to me that if men had that option, that is having sex with even not very attractive women (most male escorts do gay sex work) the prices would be 1/10 of what they are for women and only the most attractive guys would get any action nevertheless. Meanwhile even not exceptionally attractive women (by their own admission) can easily make a few hundred per hour and choose to meet with only reasonably attractive men!
I guess I am mainly surprised there aren't more takers. Sex work may be degrading and hard to swallow for many but then again working long hours in a minimum wage job often isn't much more appealing either.
Maybe it's about lack of information, maybe about fear or maybe I don't understand human nature as well as I think I do. It just seems to me there should be many more takers than there seemingly are.
>but then again working long hours in a minimum wage job often isn't much more appealing either
I can't speak for other nations, but realistically the US unemployment/welfare system is game-able to the extent that many people can choose to just get by this way instead.
I'm leaving out my own moral judgements here, because it's not relevant, but I know enough individuals firsthand who survive on government support to say that it's possible.
This is a fantastic article, echoing what others have said "informative, well-written, thoughtful, human, and funny".
After being shocked at how low the price is, considering how the market prices a related job (see my other comment for details), the second thought I had is that there might be some interesting low MRR startupish product opportunities.
Interesting that the author does porn too. Typically, escorting is frowned upon in the porn industry. There are concerns over STDs, and porn performers prefer to co-star with those having sex exclusively with porn stars.
This strikes me as a weird things to say tbh, but in the spirit of the article I decided to try to look at it a bit more rationally and not sure this is wrong to say, but I still don't like it and I'm not exactly sure why.
Well the article should give you some glimpse into the mindset behind transactional sex. I see Tweets I like, and photos of a woman with a good body. Her rate was $1,200, I am willing to pay. Consenting adults, consenting exchange, it might not be for you, and it might make you feel gross, that’s OK as you don’t try to deny us the right to make the exchange. Of course not relevant since she is not escorting now.
Perhaps his objection is a bit different( or maybe am projecting). It may feel more wrong that you are talking about it in a forum, rather than engaging with her privately
Going by post doesn't seem to indicate she is former. In the last paragraph she mentions her concerns about escorting in the future given her blog detailing the industry in this detail.
She’s posting in the replies here so maybe she’ll say whether this feels like an affront to her humanity. Still, this conversation around why it might be icky seems philosophically meaningful.
Many escorts promote themselves via Twitter. I’ve seen a few escorts after following them on Twitter. It’s not just about sex. Some people have a tough time connecting to people and this is a good option to see what the person is about and then making a booking.
I likely will never be able to advertise escorting as Aella due to legal risks and due to Onlyfans removing anyone who reveals they're an active escort.
This reminds me of my friend's story. He started dating this girl, she was intelligent and hot. He's a good looking guy and seemed like a match. They went out for a while and my friend sensed something wrong, it's something he just couldn't put his finger on. After a while he managed to get her to open up and talk about her past. She admitted to being an escort for a period of time and that is very weird, she was coming from a good family, had Ivy League education, great job and all, she basically didn't need to do this. And it wasn't for the money according to her.
I asked him what was the big deal after all, at the end of the day aren't we all making some bad decisions? Aside from being a good date, that thing he couldn't really put his finger on was around intimacy: she seemed to be, as he described, dead inside, the sex felt fake, somewhat mechanical or acted out.
> if your options for romance are with men who don’t like sex work
Well, that's a very positive way of formulating this. This could be put more accurately as: "If you decide to enter a long-term relationship, you will have to either find a partner who wouldn't mind sex work (might be difficult!) or lie to them (ouch!)"
Throwaway because I'm drawing on firsthand experience from illegal activity.
I think it's important to highlight the diversity of sex work. This one passage caught my attention:
> SeekingArrangement – This website, unlike the above, professes to definitely not allow escorts, and makes it difficult to be explicit about it. Most men connecting through the website anticipate paying around 50-70% less, as women tend to be willing to accept less money if you give them a veneer of not being a real sex worker. You can still attempt to do clear sex work here though – “PPM”, or pay-per-meet, indicates that you want to be paid per meeting, and this is the way to start out the discussion. Seeking Arrangement also had the lowest correlation with arrests,
Nearly all of my experience with sex work (as a client) is off Seeking Arrangment. For those unfamiliar it's a site for people to engage in "sugar dating", where a "sugar daddy" compensates a "sugar baby" to spend time with him, ostensibly unconnected to any expectations of sex. I find these terms cringeworthy, I'll call it compensated dating. In practice there's almost always expectations of sex. There's definitely a sizeable overlap between SA and traditional escorting sites, browse both and you'll come across the same profiles with moderate frequency. But in general, "sugar dating" involves a sizeable chunk of activities beyond having sex. It's expected to take dates out to dinner, movies, and other activities one would normally do on dates.
I think Aella is being a bit snide when she calls this "the veneer of not being a real sex worker". Almost all of the people I met considered it sex work and weren't under any illusion about the fact that money was changing hands in exchange for sex. When I asked why they preferred compensated dating rather than escorting the reasons were primarily twofold:
* Safety. It's not uncommon for people to meet in person once or twice before agreeing to meet for sex. These initial meetings are almost always in public or semi-public places (restaurants, bars, parks, malls). Most people give each other real names after meeting in person. I suppose this could also reduce safety, but there's a M.A.D. element of this that seems to work.
* Sense of connection, quality of experience. Many of the women on SA that I met spoke negatively of instances where men only saw them for an hour to have sex and didn't want to spend time together outside of the bedroom. Do they really just care about "the veneer of not being a sex worker"? Maybe, but I get the sense that many genuinely have a more enjoyable experience - or at least more tolerable experience - meeting someone few times platonically before having sex.
Speaking from the male perspective here, I'm really not sure why someone would prefer escorting over compensated dating. Aella is right that it's 50-70% less expensive. Maybe a bit less if one factors in cost of meals and activities. But $/hr of time spent together is easily 4-5x less than escorting. Personally I'm the type that sees the expectation of spending time together outside of the bedroom as a positive rather than a negative, so it's a win on both counts. Between $1200 for 90 minutes with someone and $400-700 in exchange for having dinner with someone, sex, taking a bath together and talking, and spending the night together the latter is way preferable.
The only potential negative is possibly the overlap of sugar dating and real relationships. I know both men and women who have moved in with, and in one instance gotten married to, people they met off SA. The one negative experience I had was with someone who wanted to have a real relationship and I did not, leading to a falling out and stuff being said about me - fortunately nothing that actual led to significant repercussions.
My impression that sugar babies don't think of it as sex work is based off reading sugar baby forums, but it's possible that there's different subclusters of sugar babies with different attitudes!
>a handful of memorable experiences with talented men
Talent is generally understood to mean an innate ability, but for any practical advice in this direction that can be put into words, well, some readers would be very grateful to know it.
"Her website implies that booking her will make you superior to every other man, that you will become enlightened by plowing her platonic ideal of a pussy. I only slightly exaggerate.
I’m not sure in exactly what sense you mean, but I’d say it’s because it’s the same target demographic/business segment. No, really! I mean, all advertising is bullshit[0], after all. We want novelty but also familiarity. It validates our intuition and gives us the sense that we’ve noticed something someone else hasn’t even if that’s not true. If you pay close enough attention you start to see common denominators in branding, design, and yes, even copy like you’ve noted here. Our basic job as advertisers is to be aware of the landscape of these things, preserve and deliver the important elements, and successfully convey the client’s message. The standouts among us, whether by luck or virtue, deliver something just radical enough along the way. But I don’t think that bit is as important as some might think, if not in kind then, at least in degree.
Sorry if your question was mostly rhetorical or generally just tongue in cheek. I promise I don’t intend to patronize. I guess you inspired me.
This is a fantastic article. I hope this goes viral. Sex work should be legalized, regulated, and protected. Escorts should be able to call the police without fear of being arrested if they are abused.
I have several female friends who are escorts, or rather "providers", and the term most frequently used for the men (as OP said) is "hobbyists". However, they don't really see "hobbyist" as derogatory as OP claims. Which is interesting.
I'm saddened that she describes such a solo experience. There is (was before COVID) a weekly meetup at a local restaurant where the providers got to know each other and swap stories. There was a back channel network where they could blacklist individuals. It was a cohesive group that looked out for each other. They even had presentations on how to launder money through Etsy. As OP said, the IRS will notice!
In addition, some women jumped in for a short period, but some stick around. One friend have been at it for over 15 years: there long-term relationships are pretty amazing to hear about. We dated and I would sometimes get de-identified summaries of fetishes.
There are "old timers" in this profession just like programming. This OP is like a ReactJS dev talking to CGI-BIN devs. I use this analogy becuase one of my friends worked mostly with programmers and went by "RubyGetsRailed" online.
EDIT: I hope I'm not mansplaining, but it is a diverse community that exists everywhere and I wanted to share the variations I've encountered.
I wonder what her motivation is in writing these guides. Also why does she still work as an escort if she's already made so much money? (Also from camming and OnlyFans)
As the author mentions, some clients are busy and just want a sure thing. Others are cheating on their partner and don’t want to involve a civilian who might blow up their spot.
I’d say that most important is that she was SUPER thoughtful about the experience she provided to her clients. Things like identifying non-latex condoms to avoid allergies, wearing a short necklace so it won’t slap him in the face.
Whenever I pay more for something and am glad I did, it’s almost always because I am impressed by the attention to detail. Then again, maybe that’s because I, too, pay attention to detail.
I think the problem is your idea of the patrons and their reasons for hiring escorts. Maybe it's just me, but "go find someone in a bar" isn't even in the same ballparks.
This price is on the high end. But many people like myself don't have the courage, confidence, looks, or complex social skills required to succeed by going to a bar and trying to pick up a girl. Then when you look at how much time and disappointment you'd have to go through to do the same through something like Tinder, then suddenly paying a few hundred starts to make sense. And quote from somewhere, "you're not paying for the sex, you're paying her to leave after".
Sex/conversation/whatever with a person you really like and feel that you click with, who focuses all her skill attention on giving you the time of your life, is completely different than with some random person you would rather not wake up next to in the morning. There are lots of men with that kind of money to spend but only one Aella.
> Cant most people just go hook up at a bar or smth if they're that desperate?
Most people can "just go hook up" at a bar or whatever, but then again, most people don't pay for escorts. Some people can't "just go hook up", though, and I would assume those people form a significant part of escorts' client base (the author described these as inexperienced young people). The author also described other motivations, like busy rich people, and people wanting to cheat on their partners.
Might vary a bit locally (~within Europe), but the gap between those numbers is way too large. StackOverflow survey puts a factor 2 (or 1.8 or something) between EU and US, not a factor 6.
300k+ is, from what I gather, very high for US, whereas 50k is more or less entry level in western EU. But take my impression as a data point (or a cluster), not the ultimate source of truth.
That's quite impressing with its sophistication. I'm from post-Communist country and talking with my former (female, heterosexual) dates from the same country, guys from Anglosphere countries get sex with them relatively easy and free of charge - because of curiosity and cultural inferiority well preserved by your show business. These are regular attractive girls and women which later on have families, children, and unaware partners. Meantime I probably wouldn't even go through the screening process of an escort in an Anglosphere country... not to mention the ridiculous prices... sad. Rare matches with American ladies on OLD which aren't some form of scam just don't stick at all. Even the dating over here was taken over by an American media group, you guys just want an absolute monopoly on sex. All that remains for us is your porn.
There exist dominating languages in western culture - English, Spanish, French, German, and native speakers are getting comparatively easy pass. English has the magnifying factor of mostly American movie and music industries. I mean more the ruthless evolutional and statistical factors - no American, Spanish, French, German lady comes over here looking for romance, marriage, or sex. I might relocate there but starting my life from scratch, I will not be attractive in comparison with more established guys. For a lady starting from the scratch is not much a hinderance, she will find a patron of some kind. So there is natural migration of people and people are free to make their romantic choices, but this migration is very unidirectional and causing significant frustrations among a spectrum of demographics.
Dunno, their perceived higher status and an intention to marry up? Oikophobia based on real experiences (poverty, economic instability) but as well on some imaginary grounds (biased content by mostly foreign owned media, ads)? Probably more and it's more complicated...
This is so weird. In some US states, you can buy weed legally but hiring a prostitute is illegal. Where I come from, its the other way round. Go figure.
The funniest part of this article (in the context of being posted on HN) is that the author separately mentions engineer and software engineer in her list of client professions. That settles it - normal people think they're different.
This comes up often enough here. The number of people who do argue that “software engineer” is a kind of engineer, alongside “mechanical”, “civil”, etc, is always dismaying to me. I’ve always maintained that it’s merely a common title within the software industry, based on a loose analogy. Similar to “software architect”, it’s evocative, not literal.
That is interesting, thanks. What I’ll agree to is that it is possible in principle to vary the extent to which you apply traditional engineering concepts to software development. But I believe that’s good ol’ cross-disciplinary insight (are genetic programmers biologists?) And maybe if you turn that knob all the way up, maybe you could be said to be doing engineering. But I’m not convinced of that last part yet, and I am really not convinced that it would be desirable industry-wide. I really, really like the way I work, and so do my superiors, and seemingly so do our customers; and I didn’t learn this by studying engineering or trying to think like an engineer.
But perhaps most importantly, I think we all know (right?) that the title Software Engineer is not, in practice, currently imparted consistently with how much “real” engineering is being applied.
My impression (which kind of matches the blog series) is that that "like an engineer" bit is a bit overhyped in these discussions. E.g. a good chunk of what I do is embedded software, so I sometimes work with EEs that have designed the hardware my software is supposed to run on - and the range of how systematically (or not) they approach things isn't any smaller than the one you find in software. (Now I wonder if they also have discussions of "if you are just combining parts on a board and not designing your own ICs, are you really an engineer?", but given what I've seen I doubt it - they seem to care mostly about who has the formal right to claim the title)
Yeah, that's my experience too. And I can report, from working with EEs and talking to EE family members, that they do sometimes engage in that sort of my-subdiscipline-is-realer-than-yours one-upmanship too, but more often it's about using "outdated" design practices vs. "immature" ones, or about the appropriate balance of planning vs. exploration for a given project. All very familiar territory for programmers, though there are some differences.
One of the friendships I most value in my life, I formed meeting for the more transactional version of this: at a brothel. I made a lifelong friend because I connected with someone, even though I was paying for sex.
I’m not expecting to change your mind about whether this kind of interaction can become a meaningful connection. But I know from experience it doesn’t have to be empty.
XCIX
Ah, Love! could you and I with Him conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits--and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!
This is what I have to show you of this experience, and potentially of all others:
XXVII
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door where in I went.
XXVIII
With them the seed of Wisdom did I sow,
And with mine own hand wrought to make it grow;
And this was all the Harvest that I reap'd--
"I came like Water, and like Wind I go."
This is from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyiam.
Perhaps the experience had meaning for you. I know what I have read.
The article reads like an advertisement. She claims to have had many intimate, beautiful experiences with johns but she's charging $1200/hr. How beautiful can a purchased experience be? Plus, the whole thing reenforces regressive stereotypes wherein men are valued for their money and women for their bodies.
Regardless of whether prostitution should be legalized on liberal grounds, it is not prosocial behavior and it is unfortunate that the taboo against it seems to be decaying.
Live theater, concerts, and therapy are all purchased experiences, too, and they can all be pretty powerful experiences on either side of the transaction. I don't see why escorting that includes conversation would be any different.
Why should we keep being controlled by the regressive moral taboos of puritan America?
Is it a law of physics? What is the problem with bodies? Are smart people superior to beautiful people?
Although as a male I highly support that sex work be legal, and acknowledge it as legitimate work, I do not tend to honestly respect this type of work (besides the courage to do it and such). I find it quite unfair be able to make so much money for relatively low effort (at least it feels that way despite the downsides/dangers).
But I must say that this escort is super smart and has a really good sense of business. This article also gave me some newfound respect for escorts for the fact that although on the surface they seem to mostly just use their bodies, they do put in a lot of effort on the business and strategy side which people don't talk about.
I read the entire article.
By making a lot of relatively low effort I mean selling something for a lot that's not a expensive items or valueable experienced labor.
And like I said, before I thought this was all low effort work, and through this article I got to see the high effort business side.
> I find it quite unfair be able to make so much money for relatively low effort
I hope you hate capitalism then. It's all about supply and demand. As a gay man with some friends who escort, their rates are much lower, both for obvious reasons (it is ridiculously easy for most gay men to find other men to have sex with) and less obvious ones (IMO there is much less of a stigma among gay men for escorting, and at least friends I knew who did it expressed little shame at doing it).
It is absolutely supply and demand. I meant girl escorts when I wrote what I wrote. I find it unfair that it you're born a girl and are pretty, you have this option.
I don't see how the "men" part is relevant of what you are saying. The "rich" part is a good point: that's certainly more unfair.
I'm thinking that if men and women of equally poor background, women have this escort option that men don't (obviously they do, but it pays far less good on average than women).
Just that men earn more money and have more wealth than women when looking at population averages. In many cultures women are expected to marry and look after the kids while the men work, and that expectation carries over into education opportunities, parental support, hiring decisions and so on.
I wonder if Aella ever feels bad about providing information that’ll (for the most part) make a persons life worse. Emotionally, physically, and existentially.
I was squarely on the decriminalize camp but as with everything, life tends to give you more perspectives.
The ethical calculus appears to be more complicated than the straightforward 2 consenting adults engaged in a victimless crime.
Consider the current rates of single mothers, the increasing trends of broken homes and higher divorce rates, one is forced to really examine what is under the belly of this beast.
Is there causality, or not?
Do kids pay the price from easier access to family breakups? Do these side deals even lead to breakups at all, or were they just serve to speed up the inevitable ?
I would like to understand if there is a way to estimate the impact of any broad change in policy.
Thing do bode well in one respect: AFAIK, decriminalizing marijuana in portugal led to less drug abuse.
Considering that prostitution has been around forever, and divorce has been long-term falling since the initial transition when it became legal and socially acceptable, I think you should examine some of your assumptions.
I mean, anchoring your price high, to better capture the businessman/enterprise market? And that this market also happens to be less likely to be time-suck jerks about little issues, or constantly asking for product changes/features? Literally better b̶a̶n̶g̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶buck for your bang.
And it’s right out of the classic @patio11 essays, too. Charge more, indeed.